School of Distance Education

Deto Nation 
by Ocean Vuong 
Born in Saigon, poet and editor, Ocean Vuong 
is the author of the poetry collections 
Night Sky With 
Exit Wounds
(2016), winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot 
Prize, and the chapbooks 
No
(2013) and 
Burnings
(2010). His novel, 
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
12 
(2019), was longlisted for the 2019 National Book 
Award for Fiction. His books have been translated to 
Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi and Russian.His grandfather 
was an American soldier for the US Navy and was 
posted to Vietnam where him and his grandmother met 
and had three daughters. As a result of this, in his poems 
he often refers to the Vietnam war as the start of his 
family. At the age of two him and his family moved to 
Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong’s father left shortly after 
their relocation and left him to be raised by all the 
women of his family.
The poem Deto Nation belongs to his collection 
of poetry called 
Night sky With Exit Wounds. 
The 
collection 
brims 
with 
surreal 
imagery. 
Vuong 
authoritatively lays claim to a range of symbols and 
tropes: hands and guns; words and stars. Vuong 
possesses a large and unusual imagination
The poem starts off with a linguistic pun --
detonation as the explosion, and the focus on "Deto" and 
then "Nation." It talks about his inability to reconcile 
with the pain inflicted on him by his father. He hopes to 
alleviate the pain through writing. The poet speaks of a 
joke that ends with “huh? “There is a kind of uncertain , 
“Joke of bomb “ he tells us about his father. The first 
four stances represents the conflict in the poet’s mind.
He believes that the shadow of his father can 
never be erased from his mind. His mysterious nature
confuses him. A sense of alienation and existential crisis 
is quite visible in the poem. The next part of the poem 
deals with night and light.Enough light to drown in, but 
never enough to enter the bone," he says. His trauma 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
13 
runs deep, the speaker still recognizes that it has the 
force of a "bomb saying here is your father." Moreover, 
the trauma left by the father penetrates to the speaker's 
insides, even the parts that are keeping him alive. The 
father seems to reach forward in time and dissuade the 
son from confronting the truth that resides in the light.