The poet and novelist’s latest collection is his first book to be published since the death of his mother. He talks about loss, addiction and performing literary drag
Inside my head the war is everywhere,” writes the Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong in a line from his new poetry collection Time Is a Mother. “I hate to say it, but this is normal,” Vuong says from New York, when we speak during the early weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March. “Displacement and refugees crossing borders, mothers and fathers dragging their children along, these heartbreaking scenes, this is normal for our species.” As he tells his students at NYU, where he is a visiting professor: “If you want to study literature, study war. For as long as there are soldiers there are poets.”
To say that Vuong is a poet born of war is not merely a figure of speech. “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist,” as he puts it in one of his poems. He was born on a rice farm outside Saigon, but after more than a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines his mother fled to America when he was two. His novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which stretches from the paddy fields of Vietnam to the tobacco farms of New England, from napalm attacks to the opioid crisis in the US, is his account of growing up “a queer Asian American poor kid” in the aftermath of 9/11. It is written as a letter to his mother, who couldn’t read. Vuong himself couldn’t read until he was 11. But before he was 30, his first collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, had made him the starriest of a new generation of poets; critics compared him to Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and he won several major prizes and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”. “You’re so / lucky. You’re gay plus you get to write about war and stuff,” whined a white student in his creative writing class, recounted in one of the new poems. “I got nothing.”
