And so, as a poet, I often invent these spaces based on truths’ ( Vuong 2019). In a similar way, Vuong states: ‘I see the act of the imagination in service of larger questions. Berry rejects the term ‘autobiographical’, preferring Sharon Olds’ description of her poetry as ‘apparently personal’ ( Berry 2017b), while reviewers have highlighted the way in which she foregrounds, not her personal experience of loss, but the ‘difficulty’ of transforming such loss into words ( Winik 2017). However, both Vuong and Berry have contested purely autobiographical readings of their work. Though contested by many poets, confessional poetry is generally understood to focus on ‘transgressive autobiographical subjects’ such as family trauma, or sexual experience ( Rosenbaum 2012: 296). By combining some of the characteristics of first-person, expressive lyric poetry with a more reflexive focus on the constructed nature of language and the self, associated with a more experimental lineage of writers such as Howe, Glück, Denise Riley, and Kristin Prevallet, Berry and Vuong re-shape the lyric, literally and figuratively, around the concept of blank space.įiona Sampson argues that Berry’s early poems fit an expressive, confessional, ‘affect-led’ lyric tradition ( Sampson 2012: 214–225). In a similar way, I will argue that Berry and Vuong simultaneously evoke a sense of loss, while acknowledging that it is impossible to put such loss into words.

She argues that Glück’s work, along with that of many other contemporary poets, combines a ‘speech-based, expressive’ lyricism focused on ‘personal authentic experience’, with a more ‘constructivist’ approach that questions language and the ‘illusion of coherent selfhood’, so that her poems ‘simultaneously create the vivid illusion of voice and reveal its artifice’ ( Sastri 2014: 189–191). Reena Sastri places Louise Glück in this ‘hybrid’ category (2014). I argue that Berry and Vuong combine techniques from different poetic traditions, creating a ‘hybridity of lyric and language modes’ ( Sastri 2014: 191) similar to that identified in the work of other contemporary poets, such as Jorie Graham and Susan Howe ( Spahr and Rankine 2002). My reading of these texts will focus on the literal and metaphorical use of blank space, as both poets evoke the experience of loss, while simultaneously interrogating their own attempt to do so. Berry’s Stranger, Baby ( 2017a) examines her grief for her mother, who died when she was a child, while Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds ( 2017a) examines the absence of a father. Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong have each written poetry collections on the theme of parental loss.

Ocean vuong exit wounds