Going Home With Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong and I are in my car on one of the roads by his house in Northampton, where he’s lived for the past couple of years and teaches poetry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Vuong is relaxed and chatty in the passenger seat. In just a 10-minute span, it feels as if we’ve covered an hour’s worth of conversation: our jade necklaces (his, a slender carving of the goddess Guan Yin that came from his mother; mine, a funny-shaped lucky peach that was a wedding gift from an aunt); his affinity for writing late at night; the thunderstorm he weathered while at a retreat at an Italian castle that forced him to write part of his new novel by hand.

He directs us to a T. J. Maxx about an hour away in Connecticut, near the nail salon where his mother used to work.

Over the years, Vuong has garnered some of the highest literary praise for his poetry. He’s pocketed a Whiting Award and a T. S. Eliot prize, and The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani has likened Vuong’s poetry to that of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. All this after his poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, was published in 2016. It is studded with vestiges of the Vietnam War and the experiences of queer and immigrant folks in America, and pulls partly from his own life.

But with his new novel, , Vuong wades into a different form. I ask him about the transition from writing poetry to prose. “If I had my way, I’d recommend the earnest pursuit of poetry for every writer,” Vuong says while I point us south and carefully follow my car’s navigation, consistently 10 miles under the speed limit, because driving and talking at the same time is not one of my strengths. His logic is that by the time poets write their first collection, they’ve started and finished hundreds of poems, which is a helpful building block for any other kind of writing. “You have much more experience negotiating the fossilization of an