Ocean Vuong

cantfindit

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 30 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.  He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst. Source

Toy Boat

For Tamir Rice

 

yellow plastic

black sea

 

eye-shaped shard

on a darkened map

 

no shores now

to arrive—or

depart

no wind but

this waiting which

moves you

 

as if  the seconds

could be entered

& never left

 

toy boat—oarless

each wave

a green lamp

outlasted

 

toy boat

toy leaf dropped

from a toy tree

waiting

 

waiting

as if the sp-

arrows

thinning above you

are not

already pierced

by their own names

Published:

2016

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Poetic Form

Police Brutality

Racial Injustice

Literary Devices:

Elegy

a meditation on death, often in thoughtful mourning lamentation

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work