In Toy Boat, Ocean Vuong uses repetition in order to highlight the fact that Tamir Rice was still just a child, filled with innocence, undeserving of death. Toy Boat is a poem by Ocean Vuong that is dedicated to Tamir Rice. Rice was a twelve year old African-American boy who, in November of 2014, was shot and killed by a police officer who felt threatened by the toy gun Rice was holding. Throughout the poem, while Ocean Vuong never explicitly mentions the incident or the way he feels about it, he continuously uses a vocabulary that invokes childhood and innocence. Most notably, in the third…