ocean vuong’s writing is fundamentally shaped by his experience as a q/ueer vietnamese refugee and he treats it with the richness and complexity it deserves. if your understanding of his poetry is primarily through snippets and quotes on the internet extracted from this larger context, or you’ve had limited engagement with a full body of his work, and esp if you’re white, you have no right to call it or him overrated or clichéd. he is an extremely skilled poet if you’ve actually read all of night sky with exit wounds (his debut poetry book), but gets nowhere near the level of earnest engagement with his poems as richard siken or frank o’hara does by so-called fans. even if his style isn’t to your taste, you can’t ignore the way his poetry has been deliberately fragmented and truncated to fit the tastes & bandwidth of white (anti-)intellectualism