Born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1988, Vuong’s mother and grandmother later took refuge in America, moving to Hartford, Connecticut, where they raised him. His publications include Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016) – which, published one years later in the UK by Cape, won both the Forward Arts Foundation’s 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize – and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010). His many accolades include prestigious fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Poets House, Kundiman and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize, anAmerican Poetry Review Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets, a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award and a Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. More recently Vuong has turned his hand to prose; his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019), which shares its title with one of Vuong’s poems, is already a highly praised New York Times bestseller. 

Vuong’s success as a writer is all the more impressive for the way in which he has sought to challenge the often-closed circuit of the lyric: ‘I think the strongest poems allow themselves to collapse completely before even suggesting resurrection or closure’. In these recordings, the openness of Vuong’s approach is palpable, as is the way in which many of his poems represent a plea for tenderness. Speaking of his mother and grandmother, Vuong has described their oral creation of their own mythology as ‘almost intoxicating’ due to their ‘powerlessness’ in almost all other aspects of their lives. This same potent reclamation is present in Vuong’s work too. Here, it is reinforced by a linguistic suspense that allows readers to connect with his message, for that message to spread.