Since his first poetry collection in 2016, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and his 2019 fiction debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong has been showered with almost every writerly accolade you can think of. His works to date foreground mothering and queerness, piercing the heart of an Asian refugee experience in America.
The celebrated poet and novelist comes to the Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Thursday, April 4 for a conversation with Minor Feelings author Cathy Park Hong and Friday, April 5 for a reading from his 2022 poetry collection, Time Is a Mother.
“We often look at queerness being innately faulty, that it’s the queerness that makes these lives tragic,” Vuong said at New York bookstore The Strand in 2020. “But in fact it’s hegemonic masculinity and this patriarchal structure that made these lives lose themselves within it, and so the tragedy is America.”
Vuong’s writing also holds — in its gentle and expert hands — the very nature of language, of words. Vuong puts language in careful and powerful proximity to itself and “embraces the quiet between words,” as described by Paris Review writer Spencer Quong.
“Writing as a poet is very akin to chemistry,” Vuong said. “And words have always lived this way for me.”
With striking turns of phrase in poems like “Old Glory” from Time Is a Mother, Vuong lays bare the violence of the American vernacular. But he also offers readers a new way beyond the Western storytelling traditions that rely on death, sex and victory to move characters through plot by literal force.
