Summary
In "Beautiful Short Loser," the poet brings together a variety of vivid images that are both serious and humorous in nature. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker warns the reader to stand back as he gives descriptions that compose the eccentric energy of his persona. He wears a backward wedding dress and plays air guitar in the streets, tastes his own mouth the most and calls this a blessing, and warns the reader that the most normal thing about him is his shoulders.
Where the speaker comes from, midnight only lasts for a second and the trees look like grandfathers laughing in the rain. The speaker states his lifelong preference for mediocre bodies. In a series of questions, he asks why the past tense is always longer, whether the memory of a song is the shadow of a sound, and whether this last question is "too much."
When the speaker can't sleep, he imagines other artists (Van Gogh finding peace by singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" into his cut ear). There are green voices in the rain and green rain in the voices. The speaker acknowledges his intensifying sadness, calling it rude, and (knocking on his skull) asks to get out of his own head.
The next image is of the speaker's friend Jaxson passed out beside a triple stack of jumbo pancakes after undergoing top surgery. Smiling and crying, Jaxson expresses disbelief over having "lost [his] tits" before passing out (Line 21). The speaker announces that his friend's sadness will end in the speaker's own self. A police officer is then introduced into the mix. The speaker gleefully shouts the end of his friend's sadness, and tells the officer that he is not high; he just does not believe in time and is saying what he feels.
A war is going on in the speaker's head and he is perched on a cliff of himself. There are no wings on his body, only "futures" (Line 31). His body was always known as the mayor's nightmare, but now the speaker states that he is a "beautiful short loser dancing in the green" (Line 34). He wonders if he will need a gun where he is heading, and expresses disbelief over the ironic circumstances of his uncle's suicide. The speaker wonders about his uncle's internal processing concerning large and small things, cages, and movement. In an important moment in the poem, the speaker writes, "Nobody's free without breaking open" (Line 41).
The speaker's uncle once told his nephew that he is not sad, just "here" (Line 42). This line prompts a continuation of the speaker's conversation with the police officer. The speaker tells the officer that magic is real because we all disappear, then asks the officer why he isn't laughing. It isn't beauty that the speaker is concerned with, but outliving it.
The speaker marvels at having access to himself for a time. There's a late light in the yard leaving blood on a bone-colored fence. The speaker then provides descriptions that deal with presence, meaning, communication, and failure.
In a crooning solace, the speaker comforts someone (addressed in the second person) crying in a room called America. The door to the room has not yet been invented. Finally, the speaker professes, he is a professional loser who is crushing it in losses. He mops the floor where Jaxson's drain bags leaked, and tells the officer he's done talking and dancing because it all makes sense. This reasoning is listed as the fact that the speaker's uncle decided to leave the world intact, that having a piece of his body removed made Jaxson more whole, that the trees from the speaker's place of origin look like laughing family members in his head, that the speaker is the last of his kind at the beginning of hope, and that what the speaker did with his one short beautiful life was lose it on a winning streak.
Analysis
"Beautiful Short Loser" brings together seemingly disparate images in a surrealistic manner to depict the gains and losses of the speaker's life. Written mostly in first-person perspective with a brief address written in the second person, this poem delights in linguistic humor even while navigating sorrow and loss. With a conversational tone and a format that mimics the process of thinking, the poet introduces what appear to be disparate images but later returns to them and ties them together.
Vuong introduces the poem with an imperative: "Stand back, I'm a loser on a winning streak" (Line 1). This has an air of laughing at oneself. The speaker is also unafraid of his queerness: he wears a backward wedding dress and plays air guitar in the streets. The poet concentrates on various aspects of the speaker's body in the first lines of the poem. The speaker claims that it is a blessing to taste his own mouth the most, warns the reader that the most normal thing about him is his shoulders, and that he has always had a preference for mediocre bodies (including his own). Later, the speaker professes that for as long as he can remember, his body was "the mayor's / nightmare" (Lines 32-33). The very body of the text reflects an arraying of disjointed images: without following a particular pattern, the stanzas contain both single lines and couplets.
In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong professes his preference for the Romantics and their big ideas and unrestrained lyricism over the spare and macho aesthetics of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Vuong says, “For me it is like performing literary drag." This engagement with queerness is at the heart of "Beautiful Short Loser."
The questions the poet then raises contribute to the speaker's persona of someone who takes delight in noticing language. The question "how come the past tense is always longer?" does not coherently stem from the preceding line, but it does mark the importance of shape (of words) to the speaker (Line 11). It also raises an awareness about time itself. In Buddhism, the time is always now. As a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, and in relation to the collection, Vuong has spoken about time as an unspooling, spiraling force that always gives way to the present. This mirrors the way in which "Beautiful Short Loser" presents disparate images but later returns to them.
Vuong writes about sadness with a sense of humor in this poem. The speaker acknowledges his own voice in the lines about his sadness intensifying, calling it rude. Knocking on his skull, he asks, "can you get me out of here?" (Lines 17-18). The conversational voice that Vuong gives the speaker in this poem creates a distinct persona. Though Vuong was born in 1988 (making him a millennial), this quote uses dark humor as a coping mechanism in a way that we tend to associate with Gen Z. "Oh no" and "how rude" have a sardonic edge to them. The action encased in brackets instructs the reader's imagination in a different way than just stating, "I knock on my skull." There is a pause in the narration and the action functions as an aside.
Bodies, and particularly bodies that have been somehow altered, appear throughout this poem. In an earlier comedic passage, the speaker admits that when he can't sleep, he imagines Van Gogh "singing / Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' into his cut ear & feeling peace" (Lines 14-15). In a later section, the speaker describes his friend Jaxson passing out beside a stack of jumbo pancakes after undergoing top surgery. Despite the surreal quality of these images, what the two share is a sadness encased in a bizarre situation. Van Gogh suffered from psychiatric disorders during his lifetime. The speaker's friend Jaxson smiles and jokes through his tears. Bodies and feelings are made borderless with the line "The sadness in him ends in me tonight" (Line 23).
The surrealism of the poem continues as the speaker is pulled over by a cop for dreaming. In surrealism, an artistic current founded in the 1920s, dreams are seen as sources of insight and are placed above reason and logic. The speaker tells the officer, "I'm not high...I just don't believe in time" and that "tomorrow" is "partly cloudy with a chance" (Lines 26 and 27). These statements seem to contradict each other, but this contradiction suggests a different kind of truth. The poem imagines a world in which different modes of truth and reality can coexist.
The speaker's own sadness and struggles begin to show. He states, "inside my head, the war is everywhere" (Line 29). He recounts his uncle's suicide with apparent comedic irony, expressing disbelief that his uncle (who worked at the Colt factory for fifteen years) used a belt at the end. But the poem does not linger in sorrow. The line "Nobody's free without breaking open" responds to the theme of the self as a doorway to transformation introduced in "The Bull" (Line 41). The focus on spaces and doorways becomes political in the lines, "I know. I know the room you've been crying in / is called America. / I know the door is not yet invented" (Lines 52-54).
In a line that echoes Elizabeth Bishop's "The art of losing isn’t hard to master" ("One Art"), the speaker in "Beautiful Short Loser" proclaims that finally, after years, he is now a "professional loser" (Line 55). Subsequently, the poem repeats its previous images, now structured as explanations. The anaphora "because" structures the poem's final movement, ending with hope alongside the inevitability of loss.
