Ocean Vuong’s Books, Poems and More
Queer, Vietnamese, Tender—And Unmistakably Timeless
If language is a body, Ocean Vuong tattoos his verses into its skin—delicate, permanent, and pulsing. With four luminous Ocean Vuong’s books (one a brand-new release in 2025), Vuong has carved a poetic space for those of us who feel deeply, live liminally, and crave a softness in storytelling that doesn’t sacrifice truth. A Vietnamese American and a proud voice within the LGBTQIA+ community, Vuong doesn’t just write poems and novels—he builds sanctuaries out of syllables. Each work is a kind of emotional alchemy, tender enough to cradle grief, strong enough to carry generations.
From the ache-soaked lines of Night Sky with Exit Wounds to the genre-blurring grace of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s work speaks to a generation fluent in contradiction: raw yet refined, heartbroken yet hopeful, digital but yearning for roots. His latest book (yes, the 2025 drop) feels like a homecoming and a horizon all at once—made for the millennial inclusionalist soul who knows identity isn’t a box to check but a kaleidoscope to turn. Ocean Vuong doesn’t just give us words—he gives us a way to breathe through them.
The Emperor of Gladness
“A masterwork.” –Bryan Washington, author of Palaver and Family Meal Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016
“Extraordinary.”—Los Angeles Times
Ocean Vuong’s poetry first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”–and very human–subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant.”
Torso of Air
Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night–sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side–
Waiting.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A New York Times bestseller – Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction – Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytellingNew York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.
Named a Best Book of the Year by:
GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and more!
Time Is a Mother
“Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellowship, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
