My Vietnam is transgressive, the Vietnam that rears its hideous head again and again throughout our human history it is the Vietnam of the Middle East, of Troy and Rome, the one in our streets, our homes, and our minds.

This would seem to be what Vuong means, in his interview with the Well and Often Press, when he says, The heart symbols and the ampersand in the passage are runic stylings from the land of the MFA into which he has traveled. That and what is likely to have been a humble apartment nearby. In a strange way, a small immigrant Vietnamese nail salon in East Hartford, Connecticut, where his mother provided for him by doing manicures and pedicures, is Voung's home country. But then a grandmother's stories are an even more tenuous connection to Vietnam. The few distinctly American locales in this volume only highlight how tenuously he is connected to them. The same could be said of his father's violence. The few American products, aside from its language, in his poems, are so portable they could easily have been found in wartime Vietnam. It is also emblematic that the poems are in the English language that Vuong took so long to acquire, presumably due to his moving almost entirely among a small Vietnamese community. His grandmother's stories (themselves poetry) brought the country vividly alive before him. Vietnamese was his only language until he was 11 years old. Vietnam is present everywhere, however much Vuong has not seen the land of his birth since he was one year old. That mystery plays out in a largely female immigrant world. The photo is emblematic of Night Sky with Exit Wound, Vuong's first book of poetry. More likely it was taken in the refugee camp in the Philippines in which he lived during the next year. The close-cropped background is perhaps in Saigon, Vietnam, where he was born and lived the first year of his life. Or perhaps the photo is the one referred to in an earlier poem, in which case the second woman would have been his aunt. He is presumably the young child seated between his smiling mother and grandmother. The photo on the cover of Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wound was provided by the author.

Night sky with exit wounds author