Homewrecker by Ocean Vuong

Today a poem by Ocean Vuong, whose debut collection 'Night Sky With Exit Wound' has won rave reviews not only in the US but also in the UK, where it won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2017. There are so many poems of his I could have chosen but am randomly going to choose one as there is no way to decide which one of the many gems to post.  

Homewrecker

by Ocean Vuong  

& this is how we danced: our mothers’

white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved:

a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

through my hair—my hair a wildfire. We covered

our ears & your father’s tantrum turned

to heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed

into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.

There was always the shotgun above

the fireplace. Always another hour to kill—only to beg

some god to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not

the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,

put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how

we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning

into a tongue.

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About the poet: Ocean Vuong is an American poet and essayist. Born in Saigon, poet and editor Ocean Vuong was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and earned a BA at Brooklyn College (CUNY). In his poems, he often explores transformation, desire, and violent loss. Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky With Exit Wounds(2016), winner of the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010), which was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association. His work has been translated into Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Vietnamese. His honors include fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Poets House, Kundiman, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize, an American Poetry Review Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets, a Pushcart Prize, and a Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. In 2014, Vuong was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He received a Whiting Award in 2016. He is the former managing editor of Thrush Press and currently lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he is on faculty in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

And a little more than the bio above from a review of his debut collection:

Ocean Vuong was born on a rice farm outside Saigon, in 1988, and spent a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before moving, aged two, to Hartford, Connecticut. He was mentored by the poet and novelist Ben Lerner and has said that without Lerner, he would never have believed it possible he could become a poet or that his talent could travel. Vuong’s mother, who works in a nail salon, was determined her son become the first literate member of their family. About his father, who dominates this collection, the story is murkier. The second poem, Telemachus, is at once lyrical and horrific. It describes turning his father’s corpse over in the sea and seeing a gun wound in his back. ....... Disentangling traumatic memory from myth is no easy task. As one reads on, it becomes evident that the collection is not so much about drowning as about the precarious work of resurfacing. The poetry is a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide.