So I lost. / I lost it all with my eyes / wide open.” In “Threshold,” which opens the collection, he writes, “I didn’t know the cost / of entering a song-was to lose / your way back. / So I entered. Vuong uses language to conjure wholeness from a situation that language has already broken, and will continue to break loss and survival are always twinned. It would allow him to make visible the memory of his mother breaking a pencil as she wrote “ a b c” over and over, trying to teach herself the alphabet, the “ b bursting its belly / as dark dust blows / through a blue-lined sky,” nail-salon chemicals emanating from the sweat that seeps through her pink “I ♥ NY” T-shirt. Language, for him, would be a conduit rather than an impediment. By “pressing / this pen to paper, I was touching us / back from extinction,” he writes. But as he began to write poetry, in childhood, he wrenched himself into the existence that would separate him from his family even as he honored them. Vuong couldn’t speak English when he started school in Hartford, and couldn’t read at grade level until age eleven. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.” In another, the lyrics of “White Christmas”-the playing of which, on Armed Forces Radio, signalled the final military evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese refugees from Saigon-are intercut with images of death, abandonment, a sky “shredded / with gunfire,” helicopters “lifting the living just out of reach.” In one poem, Vuong writes, “ An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. At the center of his work is the paradox of his situation: the grief and the freedom that accrue simultaneously as he writes his way toward and away from his forebears. His début collection, “ Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” was published in 2016, and made him just the second poet to win the T. S. program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is thirty years old, and teaches in the M.F.A. The mother cannot speak English, or read any language the more complex and ambitious the son’s work becomes, the greater the gulf between his writing in English and her basic Vietnamese-and the more impossible it is for her to understand him, in return. There she raises a son, who was born on a rice farm but grows up in the back rooms of Hartford nail salons, and becomes not just the first person in the family to attend school past the sixth grade but a poet who wins prizes and is hailed in major magazines. Think of a woman from Vietnam, the daughter of a farm girl and a nameless G.I., who moves from a refugee camp in the Philippines to public housing in Connecticut. For many immigrants, the best-case scenario is that their children will never really understand them.
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