Following the acclaim of his debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong confronted expectations for his second book. Rather than craft more poems or turn to memoir, he found power in imagination and freedom in embellishment and wrote a stunningly original novel: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Ocean Vuong made his literary debut in April 2016 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds, a poetry collection that chronicles a family’s journey as refugees from Vietnam to America, where the poems’ young speaker grows up attuned to the turmoil of his family’s traumas while becoming aware of his sexual identity. Vuong’s meteoric rise in popularity was immediate, and so was the positive critical response to his lyrical voice.
In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani raved about “his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.” The book’s warm reception was accompanied by a number of prizes and honors from the Whiting Foundation (Whiting Award), the Lannan Foundation (Lannan Literary Fellowship), the T. S. Eliot Foundation (T. S. Eliot Prize), Publishing Triangle (Thom Gunn Award), Forward Arts Foundation (Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection), and others. The New York Times went on to name it one of the top ten books of 2016. All for the first book of poems by a relative newcomer to the literary scene.
This story is from the July - August 2019 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the July - August 2019 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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