89 Minutes With … Ocean Vuong

The balladeer for the sensitive queer has a metaphor for everything and a new book of poems.

- By Brock Colyar. Photograph by Gioncarlo Valentine for WSJ

I just have that octave that doesn’t cut through anything,” says Ocean Vuong when I find him sitting perfectly upright in a booth at the back of the wood paneled lobby of the Marlton Hotel near Washington Square. The poet, novelist, and certified MacArthur “genius” tends to shy away from anywhere too boisterous, and not only because he’s so soft spoken. He’d suggested we meet up here to discuss his exquisite new book of poetry (everything about Vuong is a bit exquisite), Time Is a Mother, a lyrical follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2019 best-selling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in part because the writer Alexander Chee had told him it would be quiet. But I can barely hear him over the rattling of cocktail shakers.

Vuong is wearing nerdy-sexy glasses and a maroon beanie from which his short black bangs peek out. A long earring dangles off one ear; he says it’s something of a nod to his mother as well as a declaration of his queerness. Then he keeps unpacking. “This is just like a thesis of myself,” he says. “I’m always off-kilter.” In other words, the earring is, in his complicating and diversionary thinking, something else: a metaphor. Vuong spins metaphors for almost everything, including his ambition, which he prefers not to talk about too directly.