ocean_vuong

I finished the second draft of this novel at @mokkakaffi in Reykjavik back in June, 2022. 11 drafts later, I returned to pay my thanks to this place, a quiet abode (no music! no internet!) where words can gain their crucial shadows in the mind. and to Iceland itself, a place that has, through the past 13 years, become an unexpected but increasingly major part of my creative life (I finished the last edits to On Earth at the Perlan and cried alone surrounded by more sky than I could dream of). to the friends and artists here, to the landscape, and the ancient and immense reverence for storytelling in all its forms, I bow to you. thanks especially to @bjork and Thurídur Jónsdóttir for being such pitch-perfect cicerones and hosts. strange, how we must often go far from the world (the wound?) we write of just to see it more clearly, America more sharp and resonant when I am no longer in it, the memory of it more real, somehow, than its reality. the stain of a thing suddenly larger than the thing itself. 🎄🙇🏻‍♀️🇮🇸

galleys are here, which is when it all starts to feel real. the hardest dang book I’ve written in my little life, but that’s how it goes. writing is often a wager. and sometimes you gotta empty your hand. also happy to say the pub date has been pushed up to May 13th, 2025 for US, Germany, Netherlands, and Denmark. and May 15th for UK Translations coming shortly after: Spanish, Catalan, French, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Romanian, Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, Taiwanese, Thai and more in the works 🌱 pre-order via link in n bio

Italy, last June 🌱

My goal as a writer, since the very beginning, was always to write 8 books, modeled after the Eightfold Path. I feel insanely lucky (and relieved) to have finished number 4. This one took something from me I don’t think I’ll ever get back, and I can’t wait to share it with you. —————————————————————————— Thank you @ryanmcginleystudios for lending this incredible image for the cover, a photo I’ve loved (and dreamed with) for many years. I’m proud that this continues the tradition of photography gracing the cover of every book I’ve written thus far. ✨ coming 6.3.25 (link in bio for more details and to pre-order)

10 years ago today. Staring at the manuscript for my first book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, in utter frustration, disgust, and what seemed like an insurmountable sense of failure. I swear, you look at something long enough, even something you’re proud of, and it starts to wither right before your eyes. After working on it for seven years, I was never prepared, baby poet that I was, to arrive at a moment where I just wanted to scrape it all away, start over and cleanse myself of all the things I felt was wrong with it. I think I would have done so if I wasn’t so exhausted, having stayed up into the wee hours trying to “make it right”. The very next day, in what seemed like a sequence from the most melodramatic, saccharine movie ever, I got a call from @copper_canyon_press (while on the train to my first class in grad school) saying they wanted to publish it, having sent it to them nearly a year ago and thinking it was lost in the mail. Some things are so corny you couldn’t put them into art—and yet they arrive, in all their contrived serendipity, right before you. The truth is I kept the book as it was not because I was happy with it—but because I respected the editors’ faith in it. It’s possible, I learned then, to work on something for so long, with so much obsessive, at times maniacal, care, and still not truly “know” it. Could the final state of a work be so arbitrary, wherein what gets sent into the world has nothing to do with excellence or achievement or internal triumph—but rather, love? Your bewildered love of and for others, for the vocation itself, that allows you, not so much to complete something, but simply hand it off the moment you are called forth? When you are summoned, despite yourself? Anyway. What a ride this decisive moment has taken me. Thanks for coming along. And thanks to Peter for snapping this photo, who was probably just trying to document my grumpiness! 🌱

immense harvest of wild blueberries this year. rose at dawn to gather them with dear friends as the fog closed in around us, and with it the sound of rakes breaking the rye, the muffled bumps of berries filling the trough, and underneath that the silence suddenly so dense you feel it in your fingertips, which meant the sadness was filing in too. there should be a word for the kind of sadness you’re somehow grateful for, the one that points at your chest and says “there you are, little fugitive, hiding yourself in the field of bounty on the verge of ignition.” how is it possible, to be full to the brim with gratitude and yet still at a loss for it all? is there a word for sadness so gentle you might wanna keep it, just for a little while? 🫐🌱

had a heart-rending conversation with the dear lightbeam @samsmith on their podcast. we all know Sam for their vocal range and stunning, charismatic poise on stage, but I must say: Sam is also such an astute, intelligently rich, and generously kind conversationalist, making for an interview I’ll take with me for the rest of my days. here we talked about our beginnings, open mics, Queer gardens, griefs, doubts, Etta James, Bryan Adams, fibs, grandmothers and…last but not least…the rimjob as an act of potential grace, mercy, and rescue. I said what I said, friends. 😎 🥹 (Link in bio)

a gentle afternoon at our rural “queer beach” in western Mass✨🍃

Self-portrait on 18th birthday with borrowed Nikon, 2006. Strange how I often glimpse a hidden, residual sadness in photographs once they cross the threshold of a decade from being taken. Could it be that distance itself creates a kind of longing, not to live again the years, however painful or joyous, but to do them in another way? Just once? Here I am, hair cut by my mom, no poems written yet, with a camera lent to me by a friend to document his punk band that played in Connecticut basements. Why I was compelled to take this, I don’t know. Was I ever myself or merely a matrix of occurrences in one moment, and then yet another the next? Anyway, I want to hug you, wordless, younger Ocean, and I want it to mean nothing. Nothing at all.

over 1 million copies sold across the globe in 40 languages. never in my wildest thoughts could I have imagined this. gonna take a long walk with myself and dream the big dream and sit on a bench in this enormously tiny life and say thank you thank you thank you thank you 🥺💕

i love you, earth

Nan being Nan 💕