Ocean Vuong is currently an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work has appeared in Word Riot, Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK, among others. He lives in New York.

Books by Ocean Vuong:

Other poems on the web by Ocean Vuong:
Three poems
"Song on the Subway"
"Self-Portrait as Jeffrey Dahmer"
"The Prodigal Son's Lament"
Four poems
Two poems
Three poems
"Seeing As It Is"
Four poems
"Self-fellatio as prayer"

Ocean Vuong's Blog.

About Burnings:

"'I was born because someone was starving…' ends one of Ocean Vuong’s poems, and in that poem, as in every other of his poems, Ocean manages to imbue the desperation of his being alive, with a savage beauty. It is not just that Ocean can render pain as a kind of loveliness, but that his poetic line will not let you forget the hurt or the garish brilliance of your triumph; will not let you look away. These poems shatter us detail by detail because Ocean leaves nothing unturned, because every lived thing in his poems demands to be fed by you; to nourish you in turn. You will not leave these poems dissatisfied. They will fill you utterly."
—Roger Bonair

"Ocean Vuong is a poet of rare lyrical gifts and urgent stories to tell. 'Memory,' he writes, 'has not forgotten you.' No, it hasn’t forgotten the burning city or the taste of blood nor the hanging of rags or the violence of war. Vuong’s poems are testament to the enduring power of poetry and its place in this human universe."
—Hoa Nguyen