The Bull
Appearing only once in the collection, the bull remains relevant throughout because it is in the epigraph poem. The bull outlines several important themes that appear throughout the collection: beauty and discomfort, the importance of outlines themselves, and the self as a doorway.
Ocean Vuong is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism; The Ten Bulls of Zen is a metaphoric progression of the steps toward self-realization.
Mother
Appearing in the collection as an incarnation that the speaker addresses, as memory, and as a metaphor for time, this character is referred to as Rose, Hồng, or as a mother.
Emerging in the poem "Snow Theory," she is a dry outline of the speaker's mother lying in the snow. He asks her not to vanish again, which gestures toward the sense of loss inherent in the poet's relationship with this character. Her absence at times takes on the qualities of a physical place: in the poem "Künstlerroman," the "country of sons" is "a country that no longer exists" (Lines 47-49).
Other members of the family are mentioned in relation to her, including her brothers, husband, parents, and niece. In this way, she gives shape to the entire family. She is the origin from which the speaker was "lifted, wet and bloody...into the / world, screaming // and enough" ("Not Even" Lines 96-98). It is not just the biological sense of origin that the speaker explores, but his entire sense of self.
Speaker/Persona
Though the poems in this collection draw on Vuong's identity, experiences, and personal themes, a poem's speaker should not be equated directly with the poet.
At times simultaneously humorous and pondering (as in "Beautiful Short Loser" and "Not Even"), Vuong's poems offer a very distinct voice (with the exception being “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,” where the list speaks for itself).
Often, the speaker takes on a conversational tone to engage the reader with storytelling, such as the following beginning lines: "Stand back, I'm a loser on a winning streak," "So I was driving...," "When they ask me what it's like," etc. (appearing respectively in "Beautiful Short Loser," "American Legend," and "The Last Dinosaur").
In some of the poems, the speaker's voice mimics speech and thought. For example, successive lines in "Not Even" read, "When I threw myself into gravity and made it work. Ha. // I made it out by the skin of my griefs. // I used to be a fag now I'm lit. Ha" (Lines 18-20).
Authority Figure
In a few of the poems, authority figures are mentioned or interacted with. For example, in "Beautiful Short Loser," a cop pulls the speaker and a friend over "for / dreaming" (Lines 24-25). The speaker has a few comedic exchanges with the cop. Later, the speaker's body is referred to as "the mayor's / nightmare" (Lines 32-33). These lines function to create humor while showing the ways in which the speaker chafes against "normal" social roles.
Father
Though not a main theme of the collection, male violence is explored through the character of the speaker's father. Vuong's own father disappeared shortly after the family arrived in the United States, thus Vuong often focuses on the idea of a father in his work.
The poem "American Legend" tells a story about the speaker and his "old man" driving to go put their dog down. When the car crashes, the speaker says, "Maybe / I wanted, at last, to feel him / against me" (Lines 25-27). The storytelling performed by the speaker in this poem is done to "hold / [his] father," and he calls it "an old story" (Lines 88-89 and 90).
In "Künstelorroman," the speaker rewinds a tape of his life and watches as the rewinding undoes the violence inflicted by his father on his mother. It reads,
...His father's fist retracts from her
nose, whose shape realigns like a fixed glitch. If I slowed it
down here, I might mistake the man's knuckles for a caress,
as if soothing something with the back of his hand so it
won't fall apart. (174-179).
The violence is undone and figured into a gesture of caress. This relates to the larger theme of the power of writing, which the poet uses to redefine events in his life.
