The final night of the museum's Sunken Garden Poetry Festival started with music by Braiden Sunshine, a young singer songwriter type with some success on The Voice. Sunshine's songs were fairly sunny and full-voiced. One tune about Tennessee whiskey seemed odd because this young lad didn't seem old enough to know where his dad's liquor cabinet was, let alone raid it for some booze.
Hartford native and poet Ocean Vuong is a young Vietnamese-American who has work in many publications. Currently teaching at Umass-Amherst, Vuong was tiny, fragile, and effeminate. His poems came with brief whispered introductions. The poems were read in a different, slightly stronger voice as if he took on another persona. Weighty topics, his illiterate nail salon working mother in "A-B-C", or one about a gay couple being burned alive in Texas. The performance was brief, but heavy in a beautiful location.
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