The speaker is the primary, first-person singular character of “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” In conventional poetry analysis, we often need to distinguish between the speaker of the poem and the poem’s author, particularly if the poem is written from a first-person perspective. However, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is an exception to the rule: the highly intimate subject matter, his frequent attempts to comfort “Ocean” in the poem (“Ocean, don’t be afraid”), and his focus on subjectivity and contemplation of personal experience places the poem within the lyric genre, in which a poem in the first-person is reflective of the poet’s thoughts (19).

Additionally, the speaker, Vuong himself, encourages the further conflation of himself with “Ocean,” the addressee of the poem. After all, Vuong, the speaker, frequently uses first-person plural, such as “us” to group himself together with “Ocean.” Unavoidable, as...