Mapping Tenderness: Ocean Vuong and the Afterlives of Modernist Geography

This paper examines Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) through the lens of affective geography. It argues that Vuong reimagines modernist ideas of space through emotion and the body. He adopts techniques like fragmentation, montage, and disjunction but redirects them toward relation rather than separation. His poems use the bodily acts of breath and touch to connect moments and histories that could otherwise remain apart. The paper employs close readings of “Self‐Portrait as Exit Wounds” and “On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous” in two separate sections in order to demonstrate how Vuong turns themes of displacement into possibilities of intimacy. The notions of space in his work cannot be fixed or measured in the physical sense. Space instead is experienced through movement, sensation, and the body's awareness. The body becomes both map and memory, carrying history and rewriting it through tenderness. Vuong thus turns modernist geography inward, grounding it in queer and diasporic life. His poetry builds an emotional landscape where vulnerability fosters relation and belonging can exist even within fracture.