Now finally maybe: the forms of suspension in Ocean Vuong’s Dear Peter
Author: Iana Sushko, University of Amsterdam
1. Introduction
… Peter I think
I’m doing it right
now finally maybe
I’m winning even
if it just looks like
my fingers
are shaking
Now finally maybe. The line resists as I try to pin it down. The certainty of “finally,” gesturing towards resolution, is laced with instability by the uncertain and fleeting character of the “now,” and the precarity of "maybe" – creating a space of ambivalence, one that hovers uneasily between arrival and possibility, where certainty and doubt push and pull against each other.
Ocean Vuong's poem "Dear Peter”, from his second poetry collection ‘Time is a Mother’ (2022), holds multiple such moments of tension and ambiguity. Beginning with an address to Peter – whether a lover, a trusted friend, or even a facet of the speaker's own consciousness – the title gestures towards a letter, yet the poem unfolds as something far less defined with its abrupt cuts and shifting focus, where continuous negotiation between intention and execution operates as an alternative form of telling. As the speaker moves between painful memories and moments of tentative hope, the poem explores trauma, institutional care, and the process of healing that resists linear narratives of recovery.
Institutional narratives of mental illness and recovery are typically structured by what Elizabeth Freeman terms chrononormativity – the use of time as a regulatory force that synchronizes bodies with socially sanctioned rhythms of accumulation, productivity, and coherence (3–4). Within psychiatric and medical contexts, to be "in recovery" is to narrate oneself in alignment with these normative temporalities: forward-moving, marked by discrete events, and ultimately resolved (5). Illness becomes institutionally legible when narrated as transformation, crisis framed as a precursor to recovery. Such frameworks reduce lived experience to linear causal narratives that uphold the authority of institutional care.
Vuong's poem resists this imposed chronology. Rather than tracing the process of healing as a linear path with a predetermined destination, the poem creates a textual space where healing operates through temporality of suspension – not as delay or failure, but as a site of generative resistance.
This suspension moves through the poem, inhabiting both its formal body and thematic exploration. When a body is suspended, it occupies threshold spaces – neither fully here nor there but rather dwelling in productive liminality. Suspension is a generative uncertainty: not an absence but a particular mode of presence that refuses categorical fixity or resolution. The suspended body hangs, waits, floats in-between – resisting finality by maintaining the tension that produces it. In "Dear Peter," suspension manifests not merely as content to be described, but as a formal strategy the poem enacts.
In The Forms of the Affects, Eugenia Brinkema challenges the dominant Deleuzian approaches to affect theory, exposing how contemporary scholarship has ironically betrayed Deleuze's own celebration of "the minor, the changeable, and the multiple" (Brinkema 12). Where some scholarship reduces affect to a series of abstract intensities – "speed, violence, agitation, pressures, forces, intensities" (12) – Brinkema advocates for a rigorous formal reading of affective structures. Her approach shifts scholarly attention from what affects do to bodies to what affects are in their specific formal arrangements, returning focus to "detail, specificity, and the local” and reclaiming affect from its reduction to vague, circulating forces (15).
This essay follows Brinkema's methodological commitment to allow textual forms to produce their own affective knowledge – refusing to know in advance what suspension must be or do. My analysis traces how suspension emerges through formal techniques in Ocean Vuong's "Dear Peter," allowing the poem's own structures to reveal what suspension becomes within its specific arrangements, specifically looking at how the poem's spatial organization and language embody suspension. Through this attention to form, I show that suspension functions as a generative methodology where meaning emerges from the differential play between heterogeneous forces that exceed synthetic resolution – forces that fail to preserve their ontological singularity and open new trajectories of becoming through their constitutive entanglement.
What matters in this approach is how a text's formal specificities might resist, redirect, or transform the very theories brought to bear on them. While existing scholarship offers valuable coordinates, "Dear Peter" advances its own formal argument about suspension, its structural arrangements positioning suspension not merely as an object of analysis but as a methodology for healing. In this sense, the poem becomes a site where form produces knowledge.
Building on this close reading, I turn to a broader theoretical constellation to situate the poem’s enactments of suspension within existing critical conversations. These observations enter into dialogue with accounts of suspension articulated across affect theory, materialist epistemologies, and political anthropology – from Ahmed’s disorientation (2006) to Choy’s atmospheric becoming (2015), Alaimo’s trans-corporeality (2012), Laszczkowski and Reeves’s affective governance (2018), and Manfredi’s ritualistic suspension (2024).
2.1 Spatial Form and Visual Suspension
What happens when poetic form materializes what theory describes? The visual arrangement becomes our first point of contact. In this way, form does not follow meaning; it creates meaning:
Dear Peter
they treat me well
here they don’t
make me forget
the world like you
promised but oh well
I’m back
The title "Dear Peter" floats centered and bolded, isolated in a field of white, it is the poem’s first utterance – part of its textual body, yet specially set apart; a visual breath, creating a structure where connection (the epistolary address) and disconnection (the spatial interruption) exist simultaneously. Through its relational significance, suspension emerges as active holding in this negotiation – the held breath before speaking, the gathering of thoughts before they crystallize into language, a pause pregnant with both expectation and uncertainty.
The poem's indentation pattern extends this tension through a deliberate choreography that alternates between two vertical alignments. The text refuses static arrangement, instead creating a rhythmic oscillation between left-aligned and right-indented lines. This visual rhythm becomes the poem's pulse – words and phrases caught between positions on the page, neither fully committed to one margin nor entirely free of its pull. Each indentation shift thus materializes this textual suspension, transforming white space into an active participant in the poem's meaning-making process.
This formal strategy extends beyond visual patterning into somatic dimensions as the poem progresses. When the text moves from "the world like you" to "promised but oh well" and then to "I'm back," each indentation materializes the speaker's articulation process – moments where language pauses as difficult experiences are formulated into words. The indentation pattern captures hesitation in the speaker's voice, where each typographical break corresponds to the physical act of speaking about and through trauma. These formal choices embody not just what is said but how it is said and what remains unsaid, with the alternating alignments enacting the stuttered, halting quality of disclosure. The white space thus becomes a physical enactment of suspended voice – the poem's body tracing the trembling boundary between articulation and silence.
2.2 Institutional Imagery and Chromatic Containment
Within the poem's formal structure, institutional space emerges with a suspended quality that mirrors traumatic memory's temporal disruption. "The reading room," "the clinic window," and "a beige butterfly / knocking its head up / the beige wall" punctuate the text as clinical markers that resist chronological ordering. The repetition of "beige" – that institutional non-color – establishes a chromatic motif whose very flatness accentuates the fractured nature of the poetic space. Positioned between presence and absence, the speaker dwells in these spaces liminally, physically contained yet mentally oriented toward escape ("when I'm out once / & for all") while tethered to institutional reality.
These textual gaps materialize the speaker's threshold position, creating a formal architecture where containment and freedom exist not as opposites but as dynamically related states. The intervals between clinical references function as generative spaces equally constitutive of the hospital experience as its physical components, suspending the speaker between institutional confinement and human connection, between clinical authority and the possibility of "winning." By transforming poetic spacing from a neutral background into an active formal element, the poem renders suspension as its operating principle – a method through which trauma's disruptive temporality becomes embodied in poetic form.
2.3 Syntax and the Fragmentation of Voice
Beyond the spatial dimension, the poem intensifies its formal disruption through syntactic breakage, particularly evident at moments of trauma recollection. The text fractures the fundamental connection between subject and predicate – between noun phrase and verb phrase – when recounting the assault: "a man / in the back of / a walgreens once said" creates a jagged separation between the subject ("a man") and its verb action (“said").
This syntactic disruption continues in the transition "so I let him kiss me / for nothing oh well / childhood / is only a cage," where the abrupt line breaks enact the embodied fragmentation characteristic of traumatic recall. The line breaks create temporal suspensions where meaning continues to form across the gaps between syntactic units.
The poem further intensifies this tension through its deployment of enjambment, creating contrasting temporal effects that underscore the suspended nature of traumatic memory. In recounting the assault "in the back of / a walgreens," the line breaks create less disruption than elsewhere, allowing the memory to flow with a disturbing fluidity that formally enacts trauma's persistent presence.
The incorporation of direct speech ("fuck he said / oh fuck you're so much / like my little brother") introduces a different disruption – suspending the text between voices and timeframes. This memory neither resolves into narrative closure nor fragments into incomprehensibility; instead, it remains suspended through formal techniques that both interrupt and extend, creating a textual space that mirrors trauma's presence in the body, ultimately positioning trauma as neither fully integrated nor entirely separate from the speaker.
The poem's formal strategy extends beyond these fractures to create a rhythmic alternation between constraint and expansion. Like breath itself – constricted in moments of panic, then forcibly regulated – the text tightens around traumatic clusters before suddenly opening into "childhood / is only a cage / that widens," creating textual spaces where the speaker momentarily surfaces from memory's undertow. Concrete objects ("the beige wall Peter / I'm wearing your sea-green socks") return the speaker from abstract reflection to physical presence with startling abruptness. These grammatical choices formally enact the state between coherence and dissolution that characterizes trauma itself, holding these fragments in persisting tension.
The poem’s syntax also introduces instability, where the usual clarity of agency becomes unsettled. The phrase "unwilling me Peter" exists between multiple grammatical readings. "Unwilling" here might function as a verb, suggesting an external force – like medication – is acting upon the speaker’s will; as an adjective, conveying the speaker’s own resistance state; or as a gerund, indicating an ongoing process of the will being undone. Several grammatical possibilities compressed into one ambiguous construction mirror the speaker’s fraught position between acting and being acted upon
The placement of “Peter” immediately after “unwilling me” further complicates interpretation, raising questions about whether the speaker addresses Peter directly or implicates him in this unwillingness. This layered grammatical ambiguity, holding these interpretations in suspension, enacts the broader tensions of control, vulnerability, and resistance within institutional care, embodying the suspended character of recovery narratives that defy linearity. What emerges is an understanding of suspension as richly productive, where multiple meanings actively inform each other. The trembling between grammatical positions becomes not an obstacle to understanding but the very site where understanding occurs.
2.4 Epistolary Frame and the Instability of Address
This moment of compromised agency continues in a key passage toward the poem's close: "the body floats / for a reason maybe / we can swim right up / to it grab / on & kick us back / to shore." The phrase begins with a passive image – "the body floats" – where "the body" functions as a semantic object, adrift in a vast, indifferent expanse. Yet this passivity is not static; it carries an undertow, a slow pull that draws the speaker into motion, shifting to muscular, active verbs – “grab,” “kick” – that insist on reclaiming agency with urgent, effortful, almost desperate movement.
The move from "the body" to a collective, hopeful voice of “we can swim" enacts a rhythmic oscillation between surrender and resistance – a fragile, tentative effort to grasp hold amid forces that repeatedly overwhelm and carry the speaker away. This collective emergence unsettles the binary between the speaker and the addressee, gesturing toward a broader horizon of possibility, now unfolding at a communal level. Through these syntactic and rhythmic movements, the speaker’s positioning as a ‘sick’ body remains indeterminate, reflecting a non-linear temporality of recovery – where stasis and motion, letting go and holding on, exist in continuous, destabilizing tension.
The poem's capitalization pattern – where only "I" and "Peter" receive capitals – creates typographical anchors within an otherwise unpunctuated and lowercased textual field. This makes these capitals visually stand out, indexing the speaker’s attempt to preserve relational bonds within the disorienting conditions they experience.
Even these anchors, however, exist in a state of perpetual contingency: the "I" repeatedly undermined by qualifying phrases like "I think” and “maybe” – a form of resistance against institutional demands for legible progress – while the connection to "Peter" conveys a desire for connection that is not reachable or returned. His name surfaces at moments when the text threatens to dissolve, opening fissures through which the speaker seeks connection. This formal tension takes hold from the opening lines – Peter's name functions as both puncture and suture in the poem's fabric.
The poem neither fully commits to the intimate dialogue suggested by the title nor abandons the epistolary frame entirely. Instead, it produces a communicative structure where private disclosure and public witness exist simultaneously – the intimate "you" of address repeatedly opening into the more expansive space of testimony – suspension as a form capable of articulating experiences that exist between disclosure and withholding, between private correspondence and public testimony.
The epistolary mode in Ocean Vuong’s work operates less as a stable genre than as a means of holding open the instability of address. His debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) – a letter to a mother who cannot read English – dwells in the layered implications of writing to someone whose unreadability is both linguistic and emotional. The novel situates the letter within a specific terrain of intergenerational, migratory, and linguistic dissonance. The address is not quite a cry into the void, nor an act of closure, but something more tentative: an articulation shaped by the knowledge that it may never arrive, may never be received, and still insists on being written.
In “Dear Peter,” the act of recurring address registers a fluctuating process of recovery rather than linear temporal progression. The poem hovers in a space where articulation persists in the absence of reciprocity, where language reaches out without landing. It remains untethered. Rather than seeking resolution, Vuong’s work lingers in the conditions where intimacy falters, shifts, or fails to take hold, transforming suspension from passive state to active method, from abstract condition to embodied practice of resistance.
This suspended communication unfolds alongside a ongoing suspension of conventional temporal progression. Words like "maybe," "finally," and "again" do not mark progression so much as they trace a circular temporality – a rhythm of hesitation and return. These temporal qualifiers disrupt the narrative momentum, mirroring the poem's shift between active and passive constructions. Resolution not denied outright, but perpetually deferred. The poem ends not in closure but in continuation that positions suspension as both subject and structural principle, a poetic rendering of trauma’s resistance to sequence, finality, and repair.
3. Suspension as Method: Power, Poetics, and Becoming
Suspension makes a demand on us. It refuses the comfort of resolution and instead orients us toward the spaces between: between articulation and silence, between presence and absence, between the said and the unsaid.
What happens when we take suspension not merely as a poetic device but as a theoretical orientation? To suspend is to hold up, to defer, to make wait – but also to mix, to distribute, to keep from settling. Across sciences, critical phenomenology, feminist and queer theory, suspension emerges as a condition of perpetual becoming: a way of inhabiting indeterminacy without foreclosing it.
The genealogy of suspension begins in the material sciences, where it describes a state of mixture in which particles are distributed through a fluid medium, perpetually travelling between settlement and dispersal. Timothy Choy extends this chemical metaphor into "atmospheric becoming" – a conceptual method for understanding bodies and environments in volatile, interconnected relations. Choy emphasizes suspension's temporal dimension as a cyclical process of "dispersion, agitation, re-separation, and potentially rising again,” establishing suspension as fundamentally dynamic (2). In this framing, suspension becomes not a pause in action but a mode of continuous movement – a tension sustained rather than resolved.
Building upon the material foundation, Stacy Alaimo's trans-corporeal framework shifts toward a spatial-epistemological stance. For Alaimo, suspension describes both a physical and ethical moment of being “held in an undetermined or undecided state awaiting further information” (1). Though focused on environmental relations, Alaimo's conception of suspension as a waiting state resonates beyond ecological contexts, offering insights into how subjects navigate uncertainty and liminality. Her concept of “buoyancy” – the feeling of being held between definitive states –echoes Choy’s dynamism while shifting the focus from physical systems to affective and perceptual ones.
This resistance to fixity becomes politically charged in Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves's Affective States, which shows how suspension can be deliberately manufactured. Their analysis reveals how governmental systems strategically deploy suspension through creating "spaces of indeterminacy,” where the state manifests as a "virtual presence" that appears and disappears, generating an "existential condition of 'living from the nerves'" (9). Suspension becomes a technique of governance, where power maintains itself by keeping subjects suspended in perpetual anticipation. An affective strategy utilized by institutions to minimize resistance and maintain control, suspension traps individuals in limbo – neither wholly excluded nor securely included.
However, suspension does work of disruption. Sara Ahmed's work on queer phenomenology provides a powerful framework for understanding suspension's destabilizing potential. Her exploration of disorientation – moments when normative orientations are disrupted and bodies find themselves temporarily without clear directional bearings – parallels key aspects of suspension as both involve states of being held between established positions or trajectories. Rather than paralysis, Ahmed emphasizes possibility: “a commitment not to presume that lives have to follow certain lines in order to count as lives (178). In contrast to Laszczkowski and Reeves’s state-induced anxiety, suspension here becomes a method of resisting normative directionality, reclaiming the very indeterminacy that systems of power exploit.
While Ahmed identifies disorientation's liberatory potential as an interruption of normative trajectories, Federica Manfredi's anthropological work on body suspensions documents how individuals deliberately seek out physical suspension as a transformative practice. Her study of ritualistic suspension – where human bodies are physically lifted by hooks through the skin – conceptualizes the suspended body as a site where embodied experience undergoes reconfiguration (Manfredi 22). Her account gives material force to Ahmed’s theory of disorientation: suspension becomes a practice that destabilizes the self in order to reconstitute it; neither metaphor nor imposition, but a way of courting transformation through liminality.
What emerges across these perspectives is not a unified theory of suspension but a shared intuition: that suspension is not merely a lack of movement or certainty, but a generative tension. It can be imposed or chosen, weaponized or reclaimed. From Choy's cyclical becoming to Alaimo's epistemic buoyancy, from the anxious limbos of Laszczkowski and Reeves to the queer disorientation of Ahmed and the corporeal transformation in Manfredi, suspension cuts across registers of matter, knowledge, power, and embodiment. Its power lies in what it holds open – the unfinished, the unsettled, the yet-to-emerge.
4. Conclusion
This paper began with the attending to the text and now it is time to ask what it adds to the existing scholarship. I have discussed how the poem's formal choices – from strategic white spaces to syntactic fragmentations to patterns of address – enact methodological possibilities of suspension. They function as cartographic interventions, mapping the territories where bodies navigate institutional power, trauma, and connection. Through its formal arrangements, “Dear Peter” works with suspension as a way of life that privileges process over fixity, relation over isolation, and potential over resolution.
Through its formal strategies, the poem transforms suspension from passive condition to active politics – a methodology in which ambiguity becomes not limitation but generative force for radical reimagining of healing outside institutional paradigms. Such poetic form creates space for experiences that resist neat boxing, allowing trauma and recovery to exist not as opposing states but as interrelated dimensions of ongoing becoming.
Theory and practice do not stand in hierarchical relation but in productive tension, each extending and complicating the other. "Dear Peter" performs suspension's methodological potential, demonstrating how poetic form becomes a way of knowing that theoretical language alone cannot articulate – it is a knowledge that exists precisely in the charged space between resolution and dissolution. The poem ultimately suggests that liberation might be found not in escaping suspension but in claiming it as territory where new forms of agency become possible – where "maybe" becomes not hesitation but possibility, and where being held between states creates openings for transformation that fixed positions cannot provide.
In this light, suspension becomes not just a condition to be theorized, but a method: a way of thinking, feeling, and being in the world that resists closure and makes space for something otherwise.
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