Cover Art: Sam Jury
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 40 pages, 5.75" X 7"
October 2013, ISBN 978-1-936919-22-2
THANKSGIVING, 2006
Brooklyn's too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.
My mother said I could be anything
I wanted—but I chose to live.
On the stoop of an old brownstone,
a cigarette flares, then fades.
I walk towards it: a razor
sharpened with silence.
A jawline etched in smoke.
The mouth where I'll be made
new again. Stranger, palpable
echo, here is my hand, filled
with blood thin as a widow's
tears. I am ready. I am ready
to be every animal
you leave behind.
No by Ocean Vuong
About No
By turns surreal and earthbound, lucid and dreaming, Ocean Voung’s collection NO travels backward through time and consciousness. His grounding mechanisms illuminate memory in the contexts of seasons and journeys both short and long. Vuong addresses issues of race, family, and sexuality, populating a new mythology in his poems to clarify both the violences and the triumphs of coming of age through a haze of dissonance and grief.
About Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, he has received honors from The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His writings have been featured in the Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in New York City.
Reviews & Interviews
Review by Eric Nguyen at diaCRITICS
Review by Matt Sumpter at Blurbed
Interview with Edward J. Rathke at Monkeybicycle
Interview with Kameelah Janan Rasheed at Well and Often Press
