The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Vuong, Ocean. “Devotion.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/160766/devotion-64c12e4a58856.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Ocean Vuong was born in 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. When he was two years old, Vuong’s family fled Vietnam for the Philippines, later settling down in Hartford, Connecticut after achieving asylum as refugees. The reason for this migration was a police officer’s suspicion of the mixed heritage of Vuong’s mother – Vuong’s grandfather was a white American soldier in the Navy and married his Vietnamese grandmother during the Vietnamese War. The discovery of this mixed heritage would have subjected her to discriminatory labor policies. Owing to this personal history, Vuong’s poetry is frequently takes Vietnamese American identity and Asian American Diaspora as its subject. Additionally, Vuong’s writing also explores his connection with his mother and maternity as an overarching theme. He has recounted how his mother, in fact, was the one who renamed him “Ocean” after learning that it is an ocean – the Pacific Ocean – that connects the United States with Vietnam.

In addition to exploring Asian-American identity and the intergenerational trauma of warfare. Vuong is interested in the multifaceted experience of love. Along with maternal, familial love, Vuong’s poems are often also invested in romantic love as well as the physical intimacy of love. Vuong himself is openly gay, and, befitting the lyricism of his work, his writing often explores the experience of queer love in a highly physicalized, emotionally intimate manner. In “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” the thirty-fourth poem of Night Sky with Open Wounds (the same collection that “Devotion” concludes), Vuong contends with own experience of gay identity and same sex love through poetry addressed to his titular self. Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is focused not only on the relationship his Vietnamese American protagonist, Little Dog, shares with his mother Rose but also on the loving, physically intimate relationship he has with another young man, Trevor. Like these works, “Devotion” is a lyrical exploration of intimate physicality, in particular between men with an added religious angle, as hinted by its title and images of kneeling down in prayer and asking for mercy.

In literary analysis, the speaker of a poem should not be equated with the author of the poem. However, poems written in the lyrical mode present an arguable exception to the non-equation of speaker and author. After all, lyrics, written in the first-person, are intentionally an expression of intense personal feeling. Vuong’s “Devotion” is written in the first-person and focuses on the highly intimate experience, both emotionally and especially physically, of love within a personalized, self-embodied religious schema. Thus, in this study guide, the speaker will be equated with Vuong himself, and “Vuong” will be used in place of phrases such as “the speaker.”