Summary

“Devotion” opens with Vuong establishing his poem’s temporal setting combined with an image of the experience of radical physicality and intimacy of a sexual nature: “the year begins / with my knees / scraping hardwood, / another man leaving into my throat” (1-5). Immediately afterwards, the speaker turns to the immediacy of the “Fresh snow / crackling on the window” (5-6). However, Vuong, in the same breath turns away from this “Fresh snow.” This rejection is rendered with a metaphor: “each flake [is] a letter / from an alphabet I’ve shut out for good” (7-9). Subsequently, amidst this turn towards the philosophical during the experience of physical and sexual intimacy, Vuong forms a differentiation “between prayer & mercy” (11). What separates them, to him, “is how you move / the tongue” (12-13).

Once again, Vuong moves from this more generalized differentiation and relates it to his particular experience of physical...