The lyrics of the song “White Christmas,” which was played on U.S. “Aubade with Burning City” is a tableau of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, that juxtaposes the violence on the streets with the ethereal intimacy of lovers’ final moments together. In Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), his first full-length collection of poetry, the political and the sensual are often intertwined. His poetry is infused with the rhythm, cadences, and imagery of rural Vietnamese oral storytelling and folkloric traditions married to a restless experimentation with the English language. The child of illiterate rice farmers from rural Vietnam, Vuong came to the United States as a refugee with his family at the age of two. It does not store any personal data.Ocean Vuong is a poet and fiction writer whose works explore the ongoing trauma of war and conditions of exile with tragic eloquence and clarity. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Performance'. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Necessary'. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Functional'.

The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Analytics'. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. 2017 Forward Prizes for Best First Collection, winner for Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Cape Poetry).A shard of language may come: a phrase, a word, an anagram, and I’ll just keep it in my pocket, like a little seed.’ ‘I spend most of my time listening instead of writing. In a good year, he says, he drafts between 6 and 8 poems, of which maybe 4 or 5 will be worth keeping.

Vuong says he is ‘interested in that shifting of meaning and usage because it feels innately Queer to me - how language, like people, can be perpetually in flux.’ Words, he says ‘are, in a sense, bodies moving from one space to another.’ This is poetry of questions, which refuses to separate the intensely personal from the globally political.

In its powerful contemplations of brutality, family and sexuality, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is almost religious and almost profane. He lives in New York, and studied with Ben Lerner at Brooklyn College. The first member of his immediate family to be able to read or write, he moved with his mother to the US at the age of two. 1988, near Saigon) has been immersed since birth in the oral tradition of poetry, as transmitted through his grandmother’s ‘complex, wild and imaginative’ folk songs.

Ocean vuong