Ocean Vuong Reads “Toy Boat,” a Poem for Tamir Rice from His New Collection, “Time Is a Mother”
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Celebrated author and poet Ocean Vuong’s work, whether poetry, fiction, or essay, is deeply personal, intimate, and honest. Born in Vietnam and raised in Connecticut, Vuong uses autobiographical elements in his writing. His 2016 critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2019, Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, about a Vietnamese-born son of an illiterate single mother, was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction and won several prizes, including the American Book and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature awards. He spoke with Oprah Daily about his lyrical, moving book.
“One of my obsessions both in poetry and the novel is to be thorough with the investigation of American life. Both the good and the bad. Can we find joy in that? How can we carry those simultaneously complicated truths into the future, and how do we rescue each other without lying about who we are?”
Vuong dedicated Briefly Gorgeous to his mother, who died the same year his novel was released. His new poetry collection, Time Is a Mother, from Penguin Press (2022), “searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it.”
From Time Is a Mother, Vuong reads “Toy Boat,” a poem for Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was killed in 2014 by police in Ohio while playing with a toy gun. In this poem, Vuong repeats the word toy, emphasizing Tamir’s youth and the tragedy of his death.
Vuong is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU for spring 2022. He was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2019 and the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and has held fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, among others.
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