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Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.
89 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2016
About the author
Ocean Vuong
23 books13.1k followersOcean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.
Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst.
Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,579 reviews
February 22, 2023
The fact that Ocean Vuong can lay me out and then undo me with his words alone is entirely too much power for one poet. I've read and re-read the poems in this collection so many times there are lines I can recall clear as day, and each time, I am incapacitated by them anew. Vuong writes like his heart is hanging wide open on its hinges. His sincerity is so disarming, and the way he hammers pain (both personal and historical) out of language is nothing short of extraordinary. This is the kind of poetry collection that settles into you and becomes like breathing. Brilliant, gorgeous, heart-deep, and utterly unforgettable.
April 12, 2016
This is a lovely lovely book of poems. Nearly every poem ended in a way that left me saying "mmmmm" with pleasure or admiration or the quiet of feeling stunned by such beautiful words.
March 6, 2018
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have been experimenting with over the last several weeks. It's amazing the breadth of talent that exists in this genre.
I realized after reading the first few sentences of Vuong's first poem just how talented he is. It certainly explains why this book won the 2016 Whiting Award and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, because some of his stanzas simply took my breath away.
Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.
Vuong spent the first two years of his life living in a refugee camp, and he never knew his father. This sense of emptiness is palpable through many of the 35 poems in this collection, as Vuong imagines reasons why his father wasn't part of his life. He imagines his father meeting violent or tragic, accidental ends, or even being imprisoned. In several poems, he imagines encounters with his father at various stages of his life.
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase.
Some of the poems touch on mythological themes, some touch on more realistic, violent ones, exploring the experience of Vietnamese refugees. One poem, "Aubade with Burning City," is based on the fact that Armed Forces Radio played the song "White Christmas" as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon in 1975. The poem juxtaposes verse with lyric fragments from the song, to beautiful effect.
The more poetry I've been reading, the more I realize that just as I prefer "traditional" short stories over those which take more experimental forms and narratives, I feel the same way about poetry. At times, Vuong experiments with form, language, even writes a poem using footnotes, and those poems didn't work for me.
In the end, however, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is at times contemplative, fiery, even erotic. Vuong's power lies in his words, and the emotions he conveys through them. While poetry doesn't get the type of recognition fiction and other genres get, Vuong definitely deserves to be heralded as an artist for our time.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com, or check out my list of the best books I read in 2017 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2017.html.
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have been experimenting with over the last several weeks. It's amazing the breadth of talent that exists in this genre.
I realized after reading the first few sentences of Vuong's first poem just how talented he is. It certainly explains why this book won the 2016 Whiting Award and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, because some of his stanzas simply took my breath away.
Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.
Vuong spent the first two years of his life living in a refugee camp, and he never knew his father. This sense of emptiness is palpable through many of the 35 poems in this collection, as Vuong imagines reasons why his father wasn't part of his life. He imagines his father meeting violent or tragic, accidental ends, or even being imprisoned. In several poems, he imagines encounters with his father at various stages of his life.
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase.
Some of the poems touch on mythological themes, some touch on more realistic, violent ones, exploring the experience of Vietnamese refugees. One poem, "Aubade with Burning City," is based on the fact that Armed Forces Radio played the song "White Christmas" as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon in 1975. The poem juxtaposes verse with lyric fragments from the song, to beautiful effect.
The more poetry I've been reading, the more I realize that just as I prefer "traditional" short stories over those which take more experimental forms and narratives, I feel the same way about poetry. At times, Vuong experiments with form, language, even writes a poem using footnotes, and those poems didn't work for me.
In the end, however, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is at times contemplative, fiery, even erotic. Vuong's power lies in his words, and the emotions he conveys through them. While poetry doesn't get the type of recognition fiction and other genres get, Vuong definitely deserves to be heralded as an artist for our time.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com, or check out my list of the best books I read in 2017 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2017.html.
April 11, 2024
What makes poetry so gorgeous are often the ways it overcomes you by surprise. Lines burst out from unexpected angles of emotional insight, language becomes malleable and adapts surprising shapes, a poem arrives at an unforeseen destination, and the astonishing resonance from a pairing of words can leave you staggering in beauty. I also find with poetry a uniqueness that you can never tell what will be your favorite poems until far later. A poem may strike you deeply in the moment but I’m often surprised to see which ones linger long in the heart, which ones you turn to in times of need, which grow roots into your soul so that their lines become aphorisms that alway appear in the mind like a mantra or a prayer. Ocean Vuong’s debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a volume of poetry that has remained deeply nestled in my heart and one I frequently return to. Accessible and highly quotable without sacrificing depth, the poems in this collection have a lasting power as Vuong crafts words like ancient gods of old crafting the cosmos. These poems are ablaze in emotion as Vuong’s luminous language and imagery shine on themes of desire, family, violence, self-acceptance among others in this impressive debut that may not be without its faults but, nearly a decade later, it certainly deserves to stand tall in the hallowed history of poetry.
Dear God, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through
to get here.
Here. That's all I wanted to be.
This is such a crisp yet bountiful collection of poetry that showcases the magnificent possibilities of language to access and honor the past or oneself, and cast words into the hearts of others to share the beauty of existence and the emotions we pass through. This is such a highly quotable collection with imagery that really bursts with vivid, poetic intensity. Take the snow in Devotion for instance:
Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
each flake a letter
from an alphabet
I've shut out for good.
Ideas of language are omnipresent in these poems. Vuong, who was born in Saigon and moved to the US, credits literature for his learning to speak and read, often referencing the works of poet Frank O'Hara as a teacher of sorts. He has a lovely and inimitable style. As Daniel Wegner wrote in a profile on Vuong for the New Yorker:
One of my favorites in the collection is indebted to O’Hara, with “after Frank O’Hara” credited after the title. Many of my favorite lines come from this poem, many I quote often and are never far from my mind. So here it is in it’s entirely:
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.
Here's the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don't worry. Just call it horizon
& you'll never reach it.
Here's today. Jump. I promise it's not
a lifeboat. Here's the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty out of.
Don't be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean —
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here's
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here's a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here's a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake —
& mistake these walls
for skin.
This is such a marvelous collection and I love it so much. There are such great lines about desire such as ‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? Queer love rings out so proudly yet aware of the dangers of being out and open in a culture that is less than welcoming and violence and desire often come paired in the imagery. There is a glorious transcendence of emotion in these poems that often borders on the epic—many poem titles channel greek mythology to further this effect—and one cannot help but be overtaken by the imagery.
O minute hand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season.
(from A little closer to the edge)
Violence is never far from this collection. There are reflections of war that tore apart his family back home and also the violence from an abusive father. His parents find their ways into many of these poems, and once again we often see how expressions of love come hand in hand with images of violence such as in A Little Closer to the Edge:
Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand in hand,
into the bomb crater.
Family is very central in this collection as well as his larger reach of work across now two volumes of poetry and one novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a fantastic and poetic book that focuses primarily on his mother. The title for the novel is taken from a poem in this collection, another favorite of mine, that contains such startling lines like:
‘Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
It cannot keep.’
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a marvelous debut and a collection of poems that has certainly stuck with me. There are lines here that are always at hand in my mind. I always know I like a poem when I feel compelled to do a painting with it:
[Image: poem with lines from Into the Breach]
I want to leave
no one behind
to keep
& be kept
the way a field
turns its secrets
into peonies
the way light
keeps its shadow
by swallowing it
So do yourself a favor and check out Night Sky With Exit Wounds. It is a lovely collection and began an already impressive career from Ocean Vuong. It is also probably my favorite of all his works. I hope some of these lines can become a comfort that sticks by you as well as they have for me.
5/5
Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.
Dear God, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through
to get here.
Here. That's all I wanted to be.
This is such a crisp yet bountiful collection of poetry that showcases the magnificent possibilities of language to access and honor the past or oneself, and cast words into the hearts of others to share the beauty of existence and the emotions we pass through. This is such a highly quotable collection with imagery that really bursts with vivid, poetic intensity. Take the snow in Devotion for instance:
Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
each flake a letter
from an alphabet
I've shut out for good.
Ideas of language are omnipresent in these poems. Vuong, who was born in Saigon and moved to the US, credits literature for his learning to speak and read, often referencing the works of poet Frank O'Hara as a teacher of sorts. He has a lovely and inimitable style. As Daniel Wegner wrote in a profile on Vuong for the New Yorker:
‘His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.’
One of my favorites in the collection is indebted to O’Hara, with “after Frank O’Hara” credited after the title. Many of my favorite lines come from this poem, many I quote often and are never far from my mind. So here it is in it’s entirely:
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.
Here's the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don't worry. Just call it horizon
& you'll never reach it.
Here's today. Jump. I promise it's not
a lifeboat. Here's the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty out of.
Don't be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean —
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here's
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here's a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here's a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake —
& mistake these walls
for skin.
This is such a marvelous collection and I love it so much. There are such great lines about desire such as ‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? Queer love rings out so proudly yet aware of the dangers of being out and open in a culture that is less than welcoming and violence and desire often come paired in the imagery. There is a glorious transcendence of emotion in these poems that often borders on the epic—many poem titles channel greek mythology to further this effect—and one cannot help but be overtaken by the imagery.
O minute hand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season.
(from A little closer to the edge)
Violence is never far from this collection. There are reflections of war that tore apart his family back home and also the violence from an abusive father. His parents find their ways into many of these poems, and once again we often see how expressions of love come hand in hand with images of violence such as in A Little Closer to the Edge:
Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand in hand,
into the bomb crater.
Family is very central in this collection as well as his larger reach of work across now two volumes of poetry and one novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a fantastic and poetic book that focuses primarily on his mother. The title for the novel is taken from a poem in this collection, another favorite of mine, that contains such startling lines like:
‘Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
It cannot keep.’
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a marvelous debut and a collection of poems that has certainly stuck with me. There are lines here that are always at hand in my mind. I always know I like a poem when I feel compelled to do a painting with it:
[Image: poem with lines from Into the Breach]
I want to leave
no one behind
to keep
& be kept
the way a field
turns its secrets
into peonies
the way light
keeps its shadow
by swallowing it
So do yourself a favor and check out Night Sky With Exit Wounds. It is a lovely collection and began an already impressive career from Ocean Vuong. It is also probably my favorite of all his works. I hope some of these lines can become a comfort that sticks by you as well as they have for me.
5/5
Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.
Read
June 21, 2021I just don’t know / how to love a man / gently. Tenderness / a thing to be beaten / into.
This is a book best read slowly, out loud, in your bed during the late hours of night when nothing feels real. What a beautiful collection of poems focusing on themes ranging from immigration, the body, family, and war, each word painting a careful image that slices into you. Some of what Vuong wrote may have gone over my head, but the things he made me feel... I had so many visceral reactions throughout the book where his words genuinely made me shudder.
I’m not rating this, but know that I loved it and fully recommend it. Take your time with it, not only because you will be overwhelmed by each poem (in the best way), but also to let everything sink into you and pull at your heart. You’ll come into this book as one person and leave it as another, fuller version of yourself.
This is a book best read slowly, out loud, in your bed during the late hours of night when nothing feels real. What a beautiful collection of poems focusing on themes ranging from immigration, the body, family, and war, each word painting a careful image that slices into you. Some of what Vuong wrote may have gone over my head, but the things he made me feel... I had so many visceral reactions throughout the book where his words genuinely made me shudder.
I’m not rating this, but know that I loved it and fully recommend it. Take your time with it, not only because you will be overwhelmed by each poem (in the best way), but also to let everything sink into you and pull at your heart. You’ll come into this book as one person and leave it as another, fuller version of yourself.
October 8, 2020
reading vlog https://youtu.be/eZJy7D_2HmQ
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March 31, 2022
this book is the reason why i will not give up on reading contemporary poetry.
i cried not only because of the sadness that quite clearly radiates from this book but also for the beauty of it all, for the poetic metaphors that felt divinely nostalgic, for the descriptions that felt so vivid yet incredibly soft and for the hope that some poems still managed to convey despite the terrible events that were recounted.
i cried not only because of the sadness that quite clearly radiates from this book but also for the beauty of it all, for the poetic metaphors that felt divinely nostalgic, for the descriptions that felt so vivid yet incredibly soft and for the hope that some poems still managed to convey despite the terrible events that were recounted.
July 8, 2020
Notwithstanding his youth, by the time Night Sky with Exit Wounds was published in early 2016, Ocean Vuong was already well-known as a exciting new poet, with poems in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, The Poetry Review and other prominent poetry journals. So it was with much anticipation that I read this book. I regrettably say I was disappointed, partly because I expected a lot more in the way of a wunderkind's talent, with poetry that was as sophisticated as it was effusively expressive. Too many poems fall within a class that meets Terry Eagleton's characterization of Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," in which "an elaborateness of form conceals a paucity of content." Perhaps, Thomas's work is a fitting parallel, where his word music and emotion often outstripped the ideas that eventually drowned in the poem. The best poetry informs, opens vistas on the way we perceive ourselves. Thomas wrote some remarkable poems, but Thomas's reputation has dimmed considerably for the very faults to which Vuong falls prey.
As an initial observation, Vuong’s linguistic choices sometimes confused me. "Threshold" begins: "In the body, where everything has a price/I was a beggar." This sentence, as the poem later bears out, requires a broadly metaphoric construction, one not limited to the "body" as corpus, but rather to the effect of "in a life, where everything has its price," and where "beggar" is indicative of the absence of something essential, which in this case is not monetary at all. At the poem's conclusion, however, we find the "price" trope leveraged as a word game ("I didn’t know the cost/of entering a song – was to lose/your way back" [my italics]), which diminishes its aesthetic effect and frustrates the expectations aroused by the poem's introductory line. I also had difficulty with the poem's only simile, an awkward and perplexing figure: "His voice—//it filled me to the core/like a skeleton" (my italics). One cannot easily shrug the morbidity of "skeleton," but even more to the point, the comparison is inept; a skeleton doesn't "fill" a body. The sense, I believe, is that the father's voice provided something that was elementally missing from the son's life; although, as we later learn, the father was mainly notable for his willful absence, and so it is difficult for the reader to make the emotional connection that Vuong evidently feels. In this and more than a few other poems, Vuong betrays a cognitive dissonance where the art either forces us to cross a bridge too far or collapses under its own weight.
"Threshold" serves as a preamble that sets the tone for the rest of the book. It figures the poet, as a child, on his knees and looking through the keyhole of the bathroom door as his father sings in the shower. His submissiveness is practiced in order to gain access to his father’s inner life and, as we learn in later poems, to make the mythic connection between his "Telemachus" (the title of the following poem) and his father’s "Odysseus." Though, in poems like "Telemachus," "Odysseus Redux," "Eurydice," "Trojan" and others, Vuong's narrative persona takes on an air of grandiosity. If this were theater, it would come off as a serious case of overacting:
Back from the wind, he called to me
with a mouthful of crickets-
smoke & jasmine rising
from his hair. I waited
for the night to wane
into decades-before reaching
for his hands. Then we danced
without knowing it: my shadow
deepening his on the shag.
("Odysseus Redux")
This has the miasma of T.S. Eliot's orotund Tiresias. The risk of this epic association with classic myth today, however, is that it acts as a foil to contemporary existence, as Jean-François Lyotard argued. If used seriously, as it was until the mid-20th century, one must retreat to the notion that grand narratives universally speak to us, despite the fact that our diverse orientations, perspectives, desires and needs say otherwise. But the real reason for treating classic Greek, Latin and Hebrew myth as a disability is, of course, that the old myths are as dead as the languages that first contained them, and contemporary readers who are not scholars cannot be expected to understand their purpose in a given poem. It would have been more interesting if Vuong had exploited Vietnamese myth and folklore, rather than the old Greek tales with all their Freudian baggage. Indeed, when Vuong brings the Vietnam war into a number of poems (such as "A Little Closer to the Edge," "Aubade for Burning City" and "Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds"), it admirably serves as the field upon which the vital myth of family can freely stir the blood of Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
As a rule, Vuong tries too hard to make his conceits startling. He turns tricks with enjambments three too many times and introduces metaphors and symbols that don't seem to serve a purpose other than for shock effect. For Vuong no intensification of the image is enough, with shatterings, cracks, swellings, gasps, breakings and trauma galore, in turn made even more so by the replete introductions of bones, bullets, bombs, feculence, ordure, sex and death. The senses are heavily assaulted in poem after poem, and one wonders whether the gentle reader, at some point, will give up on Vuong's pretensions and perforce accept the poetry as surreal projections of a mind needy for attention.
Further, Vuong lets no conceit rest on his laurels, but he must extend it to the breaking point as in, for example, "Devotion":
Because the difference
between prayer & mercy
is how you move
the tongue. I press mine
to the navel's familiar
whorl, molasses threads
descending toward
devotion. & there's nothing
more holy than holding
a man's heartbeat between
your teeth, sharpened
with too much
air.
While the conceit (the purported difference between "prayer and mercy" in the motion of the tongue) is flawed from inception, as a practical matter of versification, the last phrase, "sharpened with too much air," adds little to the expression and dulls the pointed combination of sexuality with the poetic by pushing the conceit "too much." This happens in many other poems, where figurations are overburdened and force the tropes from sense into nonsense.
We observe this fault clearly in his "Ode to Masturbation," a catalogue of one over-the-top trope after another, with the mixed effect of exhilarating images and ideas that repeatedly lose their way:
you whose name
not heard
by the ear
but the smallest
bones
in the graves you
who ignite the april air
with all your petals'
here here here you
who twist
through barbed
-wired light
despite knowing
how color beckons
decapitation . . .
The transitions are vacant intensifications, for Vuong uses words to arouse the reader's emotions and nothing else. So we have phrases like "sanford towns/whose trees know/the weight of history/can bend their branches/to breaking//lines whose roots burrow/through stones and hard facts,” essentially an aleatory run-on of ideas that provide a surplus of "special effects" to make a blockbuster out of a poem with too little to say. The poem fails most notably in its conclusion:
don't
be afraid
to be this
luminous
to be so bright so
empty
the bullets pass
right through you
thinking
they have found
the sky as you reach
down press
a hand
to this blood
-warm body
like a word
being nailed
to its meaning
& lives
Because of their conjunction here, the words "bright" and "empty" lose their compass; the phrase "bullets pass/right through you/thinking/they have found/the sky," which ingenuously ascribes sentience to the inanimate (a Romantic affectation), makes "bullets" cartoonish and "sky" virtually nonexistent; and the awe the poet intends to instill with the last trope is flat-footed, as Vuong, one more time, exhausts Christian myth as metaphor (in a poem purportedly about masturbation). Yet, it is the vain mortgaging of all that was invested to bring us to this point in the poem, which Vuong then cheaply rolls into a simple grammatical trope, that bathetically reduces its value to nil. Here masturbation becomes just another metaphor for logorrhea.
Certainly Vuong's main fault is that he makes problematic choices because he overwrites. In "The Smallest Measure," he portrays a father teaching his son to hunt, drawing forth the boy's sympathetic response to the hunted doe, which does double duty as the poet's alter ego in bloated language:
Heavy with summer, I
am the doe whose one hoof cocks
like a question ready to open
roots. & like any god
-forsaken thing, I want nothing more
than my breaths. To lift
this snout, carved
from centuries of hunger, toward the next
low peach bruising
in the season's clutch.
One might casually overlook Vuong's self-indulgence in caricature with phrases like "Heavy with summer," "any god-forsaken thing" and "snout, carved/ from centuries of hunger," as well as the now customary Vuong signature of trauma in "low peach bruising//in the season's clutch" (describing the maturing peach). Vuong's device here is to make the poem from the doe's POV, endowing it not only with a poetic sensibility, but with omniscience as well. The matter is further complicated by the following lines:
Once I came near
enough to a man to smell
a woman's scent
in his quiet praying-
as some will do before raising
their weapons closer
to the sky.
The "woman's scent" in the "quiet praying" of the man could be a reference to the traditional hunt-seduction metaphor, or alternatively, a comment about sensitivity, empathy and even squeamishness (which is traditionally and unfairly made a female trait). Traditionally, if there is any praying in hunting, it is a prayer that God bless the hunter with success which, in turn, will please a woman who expects food on her table. This brings us back to the other side of the seduction metaphor. How the doe should sense the prayer from a women's scent or its relationship to hunting is as problematic as the doe POV, which unnecessarily complicates the poet's relationship to the material and makes us suspect the whole poem as metaphor, one adverse to the poem's professed theme.
When the boy cannot bring himself to pull the trigger and weeps, the father's understanding and gentleness is portrayed to great effect, as he takes the gun away from the boy and touches the boy's head with his own:
I see
an orange cap touching
an orange cap. No, a man
bending over his son
the way the hunted,
for centuries, must bend
over its own reflection
to drink.
The problem, however, is that the pathos in the gesture between father and son has been compromised by the comparison with that of the hunted animal drinking: one act is a matter of compassionate choice, the other an ordinary necessity of life. The Romantic strain in Vuong poetry elevates the natural scene of a doe drinking to a significance that in unearned and unduly presumptive. The manner and not the substance of the act is made to govern the simile. Also, the hunter is compared to the hunted (again, in the doe's mind) so that it distorts the tenor and vehicle relationship, the net effect of which renders it mawkish, giving it the character of a Disney cartoon rather than reveal a poetic truth. Even more disconcerting, the whiff of a sexual subtext that Vuong has subtly implied, whether consciously or unconsciously, runs at cross purposes with the theme of the poem, which is ostensibly about the emotional relationship between a father and son (one of the main discourses of the book).
These are just a few illustrations that reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the textual effect of the writing, where similes, metaphors and symbols are routinely overtaxed to weaken rather than strengthen the poetry, all too frequently going beyond what is clearly sufficient and adding the extra brick that topples the wall.
Lastly, a note about the book's rhetorical style as it relates to the poet's credibility. Vuong describes his family history in graphically detailed and unequivocally melodramatic terms, and, as discussed above, drawn Greek myth into the mix. Though he was not born at the time when the Vietnam war events occurred, the journey that brought his family to the U.S. is depicted as nothing less than Promethean with Hollywood-style highlights (e.g., his parents make love in a bomb crater). The portrayals are vivid and affecting, and Vuong's poetry is luminous even as the subject matter is lurid and unsettling. But one questions the epic character of the underlying events, which Vuong could not have personally witnessed, just as one naturally questions his psychic impersonation of Jacqueline Kennedy ("Of Thee I Sing") at one of the most traumatic and intimately reported events in American history, viz., the assassination of her husband, the U.S. president, in 1963. I think it was a mistake to include "Of Thee I Sing" in this volume because the assassination, even absent reference to it, relates to the Vietnam war. One may rightly dismiss Vuong's quixotic projection into Jackie Kennedy's soul as pure camp, but if that occurs then the authenticity of his family portraits is suspect.
In the end I found the technical difficulties in narrative and figuration, as well as Vuong's melodramatic style, frustrating my attempts to enjoy many of the poems. These are common faults in young poets, even those who display exceptional talent, as Vuong. However, this debut falls woefully short of others I have read in the last year, particularly Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade and Andrew McMillan's Physical. Admittedly, those poets seem to me more self-aware about what is happening on the page. I'm not sure Vuong understands the aesthetic nature of his work yet. He's got poetry in his blood, no doubt, and I suspect that he will assert more control over his material as time goes on. Certainly, he's quite capable of renderings that can touch a raw nerve in the reader's cortex. His future success will depend upon a maturation that moves beyond the special effects. Thus, despite my overall opinion of this book (which, I acknowledge, runs against the grain of overwhelming public acclamation), there are some very good poems here that any poet would envy. Whether or not you are receptive to Vuong's charms, the book should be read, for its failures as much as for its successes.
As an initial observation, Vuong’s linguistic choices sometimes confused me. "Threshold" begins: "In the body, where everything has a price/I was a beggar." This sentence, as the poem later bears out, requires a broadly metaphoric construction, one not limited to the "body" as corpus, but rather to the effect of "in a life, where everything has its price," and where "beggar" is indicative of the absence of something essential, which in this case is not monetary at all. At the poem's conclusion, however, we find the "price" trope leveraged as a word game ("I didn’t know the cost/of entering a song – was to lose/your way back" [my italics]), which diminishes its aesthetic effect and frustrates the expectations aroused by the poem's introductory line. I also had difficulty with the poem's only simile, an awkward and perplexing figure: "His voice—//it filled me to the core/like a skeleton" (my italics). One cannot easily shrug the morbidity of "skeleton," but even more to the point, the comparison is inept; a skeleton doesn't "fill" a body. The sense, I believe, is that the father's voice provided something that was elementally missing from the son's life; although, as we later learn, the father was mainly notable for his willful absence, and so it is difficult for the reader to make the emotional connection that Vuong evidently feels. In this and more than a few other poems, Vuong betrays a cognitive dissonance where the art either forces us to cross a bridge too far or collapses under its own weight.
"Threshold" serves as a preamble that sets the tone for the rest of the book. It figures the poet, as a child, on his knees and looking through the keyhole of the bathroom door as his father sings in the shower. His submissiveness is practiced in order to gain access to his father’s inner life and, as we learn in later poems, to make the mythic connection between his "Telemachus" (the title of the following poem) and his father’s "Odysseus." Though, in poems like "Telemachus," "Odysseus Redux," "Eurydice," "Trojan" and others, Vuong's narrative persona takes on an air of grandiosity. If this were theater, it would come off as a serious case of overacting:
Back from the wind, he called to me
with a mouthful of crickets-
smoke & jasmine rising
from his hair. I waited
for the night to wane
into decades-before reaching
for his hands. Then we danced
without knowing it: my shadow
deepening his on the shag.
("Odysseus Redux")
This has the miasma of T.S. Eliot's orotund Tiresias. The risk of this epic association with classic myth today, however, is that it acts as a foil to contemporary existence, as Jean-François Lyotard argued. If used seriously, as it was until the mid-20th century, one must retreat to the notion that grand narratives universally speak to us, despite the fact that our diverse orientations, perspectives, desires and needs say otherwise. But the real reason for treating classic Greek, Latin and Hebrew myth as a disability is, of course, that the old myths are as dead as the languages that first contained them, and contemporary readers who are not scholars cannot be expected to understand their purpose in a given poem. It would have been more interesting if Vuong had exploited Vietnamese myth and folklore, rather than the old Greek tales with all their Freudian baggage. Indeed, when Vuong brings the Vietnam war into a number of poems (such as "A Little Closer to the Edge," "Aubade for Burning City" and "Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds"), it admirably serves as the field upon which the vital myth of family can freely stir the blood of Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
As a rule, Vuong tries too hard to make his conceits startling. He turns tricks with enjambments three too many times and introduces metaphors and symbols that don't seem to serve a purpose other than for shock effect. For Vuong no intensification of the image is enough, with shatterings, cracks, swellings, gasps, breakings and trauma galore, in turn made even more so by the replete introductions of bones, bullets, bombs, feculence, ordure, sex and death. The senses are heavily assaulted in poem after poem, and one wonders whether the gentle reader, at some point, will give up on Vuong's pretensions and perforce accept the poetry as surreal projections of a mind needy for attention.
Further, Vuong lets no conceit rest on his laurels, but he must extend it to the breaking point as in, for example, "Devotion":
Because the difference
between prayer & mercy
is how you move
the tongue. I press mine
to the navel's familiar
whorl, molasses threads
descending toward
devotion. & there's nothing
more holy than holding
a man's heartbeat between
your teeth, sharpened
with too much
air.
While the conceit (the purported difference between "prayer and mercy" in the motion of the tongue) is flawed from inception, as a practical matter of versification, the last phrase, "sharpened with too much air," adds little to the expression and dulls the pointed combination of sexuality with the poetic by pushing the conceit "too much." This happens in many other poems, where figurations are overburdened and force the tropes from sense into nonsense.
We observe this fault clearly in his "Ode to Masturbation," a catalogue of one over-the-top trope after another, with the mixed effect of exhilarating images and ideas that repeatedly lose their way:
you whose name
not heard
by the ear
but the smallest
bones
in the graves you
who ignite the april air
with all your petals'
here here here you
who twist
through barbed
-wired light
despite knowing
how color beckons
decapitation . . .
The transitions are vacant intensifications, for Vuong uses words to arouse the reader's emotions and nothing else. So we have phrases like "sanford towns/whose trees know/the weight of history/can bend their branches/to breaking//lines whose roots burrow/through stones and hard facts,” essentially an aleatory run-on of ideas that provide a surplus of "special effects" to make a blockbuster out of a poem with too little to say. The poem fails most notably in its conclusion:
don't
be afraid
to be this
luminous
to be so bright so
empty
the bullets pass
right through you
thinking
they have found
the sky as you reach
down press
a hand
to this blood
-warm body
like a word
being nailed
to its meaning
& lives
Because of their conjunction here, the words "bright" and "empty" lose their compass; the phrase "bullets pass/right through you/thinking/they have found/the sky," which ingenuously ascribes sentience to the inanimate (a Romantic affectation), makes "bullets" cartoonish and "sky" virtually nonexistent; and the awe the poet intends to instill with the last trope is flat-footed, as Vuong, one more time, exhausts Christian myth as metaphor (in a poem purportedly about masturbation). Yet, it is the vain mortgaging of all that was invested to bring us to this point in the poem, which Vuong then cheaply rolls into a simple grammatical trope, that bathetically reduces its value to nil. Here masturbation becomes just another metaphor for logorrhea.
Certainly Vuong's main fault is that he makes problematic choices because he overwrites. In "The Smallest Measure," he portrays a father teaching his son to hunt, drawing forth the boy's sympathetic response to the hunted doe, which does double duty as the poet's alter ego in bloated language:
Heavy with summer, I
am the doe whose one hoof cocks
like a question ready to open
roots. & like any god
-forsaken thing, I want nothing more
than my breaths. To lift
this snout, carved
from centuries of hunger, toward the next
low peach bruising
in the season's clutch.
One might casually overlook Vuong's self-indulgence in caricature with phrases like "Heavy with summer," "any god-forsaken thing" and "snout, carved/ from centuries of hunger," as well as the now customary Vuong signature of trauma in "low peach bruising//in the season's clutch" (describing the maturing peach). Vuong's device here is to make the poem from the doe's POV, endowing it not only with a poetic sensibility, but with omniscience as well. The matter is further complicated by the following lines:
Once I came near
enough to a man to smell
a woman's scent
in his quiet praying-
as some will do before raising
their weapons closer
to the sky.
The "woman's scent" in the "quiet praying" of the man could be a reference to the traditional hunt-seduction metaphor, or alternatively, a comment about sensitivity, empathy and even squeamishness (which is traditionally and unfairly made a female trait). Traditionally, if there is any praying in hunting, it is a prayer that God bless the hunter with success which, in turn, will please a woman who expects food on her table. This brings us back to the other side of the seduction metaphor. How the doe should sense the prayer from a women's scent or its relationship to hunting is as problematic as the doe POV, which unnecessarily complicates the poet's relationship to the material and makes us suspect the whole poem as metaphor, one adverse to the poem's professed theme.
When the boy cannot bring himself to pull the trigger and weeps, the father's understanding and gentleness is portrayed to great effect, as he takes the gun away from the boy and touches the boy's head with his own:
I see
an orange cap touching
an orange cap. No, a man
bending over his son
the way the hunted,
for centuries, must bend
over its own reflection
to drink.
The problem, however, is that the pathos in the gesture between father and son has been compromised by the comparison with that of the hunted animal drinking: one act is a matter of compassionate choice, the other an ordinary necessity of life. The Romantic strain in Vuong poetry elevates the natural scene of a doe drinking to a significance that in unearned and unduly presumptive. The manner and not the substance of the act is made to govern the simile. Also, the hunter is compared to the hunted (again, in the doe's mind) so that it distorts the tenor and vehicle relationship, the net effect of which renders it mawkish, giving it the character of a Disney cartoon rather than reveal a poetic truth. Even more disconcerting, the whiff of a sexual subtext that Vuong has subtly implied, whether consciously or unconsciously, runs at cross purposes with the theme of the poem, which is ostensibly about the emotional relationship between a father and son (one of the main discourses of the book).
These are just a few illustrations that reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the textual effect of the writing, where similes, metaphors and symbols are routinely overtaxed to weaken rather than strengthen the poetry, all too frequently going beyond what is clearly sufficient and adding the extra brick that topples the wall.
Lastly, a note about the book's rhetorical style as it relates to the poet's credibility. Vuong describes his family history in graphically detailed and unequivocally melodramatic terms, and, as discussed above, drawn Greek myth into the mix. Though he was not born at the time when the Vietnam war events occurred, the journey that brought his family to the U.S. is depicted as nothing less than Promethean with Hollywood-style highlights (e.g., his parents make love in a bomb crater). The portrayals are vivid and affecting, and Vuong's poetry is luminous even as the subject matter is lurid and unsettling. But one questions the epic character of the underlying events, which Vuong could not have personally witnessed, just as one naturally questions his psychic impersonation of Jacqueline Kennedy ("Of Thee I Sing") at one of the most traumatic and intimately reported events in American history, viz., the assassination of her husband, the U.S. president, in 1963. I think it was a mistake to include "Of Thee I Sing" in this volume because the assassination, even absent reference to it, relates to the Vietnam war. One may rightly dismiss Vuong's quixotic projection into Jackie Kennedy's soul as pure camp, but if that occurs then the authenticity of his family portraits is suspect.
In the end I found the technical difficulties in narrative and figuration, as well as Vuong's melodramatic style, frustrating my attempts to enjoy many of the poems. These are common faults in young poets, even those who display exceptional talent, as Vuong. However, this debut falls woefully short of others I have read in the last year, particularly Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade and Andrew McMillan's Physical. Admittedly, those poets seem to me more self-aware about what is happening on the page. I'm not sure Vuong understands the aesthetic nature of his work yet. He's got poetry in his blood, no doubt, and I suspect that he will assert more control over his material as time goes on. Certainly, he's quite capable of renderings that can touch a raw nerve in the reader's cortex. His future success will depend upon a maturation that moves beyond the special effects. Thus, despite my overall opinion of this book (which, I acknowledge, runs against the grain of overwhelming public acclamation), there are some very good poems here that any poet would envy. Whether or not you are receptive to Vuong's charms, the book should be read, for its failures as much as for its successes.
December 31, 2018
“I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.”
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.”
May 2, 2019
Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an invigorating, razor-sharp poetry collection that meditates with both candor and artistry on themes of war, nationality, sexuality, and violence. Vuong, born in Vietnam and raised in the US, threads details of his own family history into his broader narrative verse that centers on Vietnamese identity. It's a fierce, provocative, political, and sensual collection that I found both challenging and moving, and I'm looking forwarding to reading Vuong's debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous even more, now.
The type of review that just quotes a bunch of passages tends to be my least favorite to both read and write, but I'll break my own rule here because my own words feel rather inadequate next to these:
- from Trojan
- from Aubade with Burning City
- from Immigrant Haibun
- from Into the Breach
- from Seventh Circle of Earth
The type of review that just quotes a bunch of passages tends to be my least favorite to both read and write, but I'll break my own rule here because my own words feel rather inadequate next to these:
"How a horse will run until it breaks
into weather -- into wind. How like
the wind, they will see
him. They will see him
clearest
when the city burns."
- from Trojan
"Snow scraping against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.
The city so white it is ready for ink."
- from Aubade with Burning City
"He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him."
- from Immigrant Haibun
"To love another
man -- is to leave
no one behind
to forgive me.
I want to leave
no one behind.
To keep
& be kept.
The way a field turns its secrets
into peonies.
The way light
keeps its shadow
by swallowing it."
- from Into the Breach
"Don't laugh. Just tell me the story / again, / of the sparrows who flew from falling Rome, / their blazed wings. / How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing"
- from Seventh Circle of Earth
December 18, 2017
This is the first full-length collection by Ocean Vuong, a rather thoughtless writer who is careless with words and who has never crossed a pathos he didn't immediately take. Voung has a second-rate imagination that never goes beyond his favorite subject, which is Vuong (see his New Yorker poem, "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," which is literally addressed to himself, as an example). Page after page exhibits poor writing: in "Prayer for the Newly Damned" he writes "what becomes of the shepherds/ when the sheep are cannibals?" Nothing happens to the shepherds when the sheep are cannibals; the word he meant to use but did not is "carnivorous" or "carnivores." Patterns emerge. Vuong chooses words with as much accuracy as a blindfolded child pinning a tail on a donkey. Take a recent poem of his not in this collection, "Tell Me Something Good," which goes "his bald head ringed with red hair, like a planet on fire." If the planet were on fire, which is impossible of course, but no matter the inane metaphor, the planet would be engulfed in fire, not ringed, which suggests a different, non-engulfing image. Or this trite simile from "Aubade with Burning City": "On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard for the first time." Every line of every poem sounds like it means something, until one actually dissects it and realizes there is nothing underneath the thick sentimentality. (One might also note that reviews rarely engage with the poems on a line-by-line basis, which would reveal their shallowness.) And every line is so overwrought as to be insincere: "For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep." Vuong is almost thirty; that previous example is not what I consider to be worthy of a so-called emerging poet.
Though Vuong is not emerging. This is his third book if we count his two chapbooks, which we should because they are not much slimmer than this collection. I don't think Vuong will ever get better. He has his market--which I imagine overlaps with buyers of Thomas Kinkade paintings or Precious Moments figurines--and he is easily marketable (and exotifiable: publications love to make note of his unusual name and his concocted backstory, which often becomes the focus instead of the poems).
Anyway, recommended if you like poems that seem like they just peed themselves in the corner of the room.
Though Vuong is not emerging. This is his third book if we count his two chapbooks, which we should because they are not much slimmer than this collection. I don't think Vuong will ever get better. He has his market--which I imagine overlaps with buyers of Thomas Kinkade paintings or Precious Moments figurines--and he is easily marketable (and exotifiable: publications love to make note of his unusual name and his concocted backstory, which often becomes the focus instead of the poems).
Anyway, recommended if you like poems that seem like they just peed themselves in the corner of the room.
Read
April 11, 2016"There are seagulls above us. There are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on....
"Everyone can forget us -- as long as you remember."
-Ocean Vuong, from "Immigrant Haibun"
...
I admire Vuong's use of repetition, of theme and variation, in poems like "Threshold" and "Trojan." While I often gravitate toward more traditionally structured, more metrically restricted verse than Vuong's, I concede that it is exactly his preference for unmetered lines that allows him to use repetition to utmost effect: unlike in a traditionally structured poem like a villanelle, you never know in advance when -- or if -- a motif in a Vuong poem will recur, and it's this element of surprise, this element of organic timing, that enchants.
In addition to the poems I've already named, poems in this collection that positively surprised me include "Daily Bread" (I totally did not see the risky ending of this poem approaching).
Reading this book feels like being loved. Unlike some poems out there, Vuong's poems aren't mere defiances ("This is what I've lived, this is the way I see things, and I defy you to gainsay this, to hate this, to pick up the gauntlet I've dropped"), nor are they mere demonstrations of strength, of wit, of skill. Rather, they're full-blown interactive cinematic experiences that connect with you, the Reader; they let you in; they embrace. I think this is because this poet lives by surrounding himself with people he loves, and writing for people he loves. Reading his poems, you don't get the sense that he is one of those poets of fiction who lives alone in a lair, squinting at the world outside as though it were a sea-monster and poking at it from time to time with a long stick. Reading these poems makes me want to live a more loving life.
"Everyone can forget us -- as long as you remember."
-Ocean Vuong, from "Immigrant Haibun"
...
I admire Vuong's use of repetition, of theme and variation, in poems like "Threshold" and "Trojan." While I often gravitate toward more traditionally structured, more metrically restricted verse than Vuong's, I concede that it is exactly his preference for unmetered lines that allows him to use repetition to utmost effect: unlike in a traditionally structured poem like a villanelle, you never know in advance when -- or if -- a motif in a Vuong poem will recur, and it's this element of surprise, this element of organic timing, that enchants.
In addition to the poems I've already named, poems in this collection that positively surprised me include "Daily Bread" (I totally did not see the risky ending of this poem approaching).
Reading this book feels like being loved. Unlike some poems out there, Vuong's poems aren't mere defiances ("This is what I've lived, this is the way I see things, and I defy you to gainsay this, to hate this, to pick up the gauntlet I've dropped"), nor are they mere demonstrations of strength, of wit, of skill. Rather, they're full-blown interactive cinematic experiences that connect with you, the Reader; they let you in; they embrace. I think this is because this poet lives by surrounding himself with people he loves, and writing for people he loves. Reading his poems, you don't get the sense that he is one of those poets of fiction who lives alone in a lair, squinting at the world outside as though it were a sea-monster and poking at it from time to time with a long stick. Reading these poems makes me want to live a more loving life.
February 10, 2019
“Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.”
“I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning.”
Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. A book about violence, identity, NY vs. Vietnam, sex, being gay, Grandma, living the legacy of Vietnam and the war (He was born in Saigon), and feels ecstatic, bursting with enthusiasm and reflecting pain. Fragmented, to reflect his fragmentation. I liked its energy and language and sass.
“. . . teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. . .”
Here’s one of his poems he reads and you can read along to:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
“I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning.”
Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. A book about violence, identity, NY vs. Vietnam, sex, being gay, Grandma, living the legacy of Vietnam and the war (He was born in Saigon), and feels ecstatic, bursting with enthusiasm and reflecting pain. Fragmented, to reflect his fragmentation. I liked its energy and language and sass.
“. . . teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. . .”
Here’s one of his poems he reads and you can read along to:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
September 14, 2018
Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poem chosen at random lights deep, protected nodes in our brain and attaches to our viscera. We recognize his work as surely as we appreciate a painting, or a piece of music. He appears a conduit, not a creator.
One of the poems in this collection has a title referencing a Mark Rothko painting. Glancing at it, we know immediately why he pairs it with these words.
In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong says “life is always more complicated than the headlines allow; poetry comes in when the news is not enough.” Vuong won awards for this collection, and gained recognition. He now is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing a novel.
In an interview with Lit Hub Vuong explains
Vuong’s poetry is available as an ebook from many libraries. He’s what we call a ‘literary light.’
One of the poems in this collection has a title referencing a Mark Rothko painting. Glancing at it, we know immediately why he pairs it with these words.
Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952)It was the phrase How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. That phrase stopped me.
The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.
& I said Yes because you asked me
to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god
only listens when we're this close
to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you.
How my greatest accolade was to walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge
& not think of flight. How we live like water: wetting
a new tongue with no telling
what we've been through. They say the sky is blue
but I know it's black seen through too much distance.
You will always remember what you were doing
when it hurts the most. There is so much
I need to tell you--but I only earned
one life & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth
at the end. The TV kept saying The planes...
The planes... & I stood waiting in the room
made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing
into four blurred walls. & you were there.
You were the window.
In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong says “life is always more complicated than the headlines allow; poetry comes in when the news is not enough.” Vuong won awards for this collection, and gained recognition. He now is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing a novel.
In an interview with Lit Hub Vuong explains
“I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie.”Vuong brings with him the possibility of a vision that is articulate enough to share, brave enough to bolster. It's a kind of blessing, a grace note we don't really deserve, his voice.
Vuong’s poetry is available as an ebook from many libraries. He’s what we call a ‘literary light.’
June 2, 2016
Mesmerizing, unforgettable, and a heart open in your hand. Vuong holds back nothing. This is one to reread and keep on the desk. To hold tight to the connection of why we write!
"When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart
there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above..."
"Depending on where you stand
your name can sound like a full moon
shredded in a dead doe's pelt.
Your name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. Why did we
keep saying Yes–
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real..."
Get this collection! You won't get closer to a heartbeat than this!
"When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart
there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above..."
"Depending on where you stand
your name can sound like a full moon
shredded in a dead doe's pelt.
Your name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. Why did we
keep saying Yes–
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real..."
Get this collection! You won't get closer to a heartbeat than this!
July 9, 2019
Ocean Vuong was not as well known when I added this poetry collection to my list a few years ago. With the recent publication of his novel, he has entered the limelight. I decided to read this book before the novel as a sort of introduction to his themes and style though I have a sense it probably exists more for itself.
Vuong’s poetry has many themes: family, loss, war, father, mother, love and lovers. Above all of these may be the idea of searching, always searching. He uses the natural world frequently to reflect beauty, but also danger and loss. Some images are beautiful; others are painful or libidinous. Some are obscure. I mentioned to a friend that I didn’t think I understood many of these poems. After she saw Vuong at a speaking event, her response was to the effect that Vuong would likely be fine with that.
I do have favorite poems: “Telemachus,” “Eurydice,” “The Smallest Measure,” and “Logophobia.” Each of these has a enough of a narrative thread for me to follow and paints a picture I am able to see (whether it is the same as the author’s is sometimes debatable.)
Recommended for learning about a new, young poet.
Vuong’s poetry has many themes: family, loss, war, father, mother, love and lovers. Above all of these may be the idea of searching, always searching. He uses the natural world frequently to reflect beauty, but also danger and loss. Some images are beautiful; others are painful or libidinous. Some are obscure. I mentioned to a friend that I didn’t think I understood many of these poems. After she saw Vuong at a speaking event, her response was to the effect that Vuong would likely be fine with that.
I do have favorite poems: “Telemachus,” “Eurydice,” “The Smallest Measure,” and “Logophobia.” Each of these has a enough of a narrative thread for me to follow and paints a picture I am able to see (whether it is the same as the author’s is sometimes debatable.)
Recommended for learning about a new, young poet.
December 28, 2020
I build a life & tear it apart
& the sun keeps shining.
Ocean Vuong is receiving thunderous praise right now for his autobiographical novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, so, on a poetry binge last month, I decided to give his second-most-acclaimed book a go.
Vuong is clearly a gifted poet, with a wealth of harrowing personal experiences to pull from and an evenhanded consideration for both life's darkness and its beauty. He understands the art of formal simplicity, never flaunting his vocabulary or rambling when he should keep it tight, and when he goes experimental he has a reason for doing so. These are obviously personal poems, drawn up from deep wells of pain and triumph, and I'm happy so many readers have responded so well to them. At times I responded well to them too! But overall they left me a little cold.
I think probably I shouldn't have started this the same day I finished Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec . Stylistically and thematically the two poets have a lot in common, but I found Diaz to be the better, or at least the more polished and mature, of the two. And that's totally understandable: Vuong is young (31 now, and just 28 when Night Sky was published), a Brooklyn College protégé of Ben Lerner's whose wunderkind status certainly hasn't harmed his recent reception.
But even if I didn't know all that, I think I'd have recognized these as the poems of a young man, with the tastes and tendencies of someone still honing his craft. Metaphors don't always come together. Potentially-poignant moments become cluttered with images or veer towards poetic cliché. To be completely honest, most of these didn't feel too different from pieces I could have been shown by a classmate in one of my own college writing workshops. Which doesn't make them bad by any means, just... not what I'd been led to expect.
I still plan to read Vuong's novel, and I certainly won't discount him yet. The good and bad thing about youth is that it doesn't last long. But on the merit of Night Sky alone, I can't say I quite got the hype.
& the sun keeps shining.
Ocean Vuong is receiving thunderous praise right now for his autobiographical novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, so, on a poetry binge last month, I decided to give his second-most-acclaimed book a go.
Vuong is clearly a gifted poet, with a wealth of harrowing personal experiences to pull from and an evenhanded consideration for both life's darkness and its beauty. He understands the art of formal simplicity, never flaunting his vocabulary or rambling when he should keep it tight, and when he goes experimental he has a reason for doing so. These are obviously personal poems, drawn up from deep wells of pain and triumph, and I'm happy so many readers have responded so well to them. At times I responded well to them too! But overall they left me a little cold.
I think probably I shouldn't have started this the same day I finished Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec . Stylistically and thematically the two poets have a lot in common, but I found Diaz to be the better, or at least the more polished and mature, of the two. And that's totally understandable: Vuong is young (31 now, and just 28 when Night Sky was published), a Brooklyn College protégé of Ben Lerner's whose wunderkind status certainly hasn't harmed his recent reception.
But even if I didn't know all that, I think I'd have recognized these as the poems of a young man, with the tastes and tendencies of someone still honing his craft. Metaphors don't always come together. Potentially-poignant moments become cluttered with images or veer towards poetic cliché. To be completely honest, most of these didn't feel too different from pieces I could have been shown by a classmate in one of my own college writing workshops. Which doesn't make them bad by any means, just... not what I'd been led to expect.
I still plan to read Vuong's novel, and I certainly won't discount him yet. The good and bad thing about youth is that it doesn't last long. But on the merit of Night Sky alone, I can't say I quite got the hype.
November 1, 2021
people tell me he's good so i want to like Ocean Vuong. but i unfortunately don't get him
maybe multiple readings of this collection will benefit me better, but the first read went way over my head. some lyricism is stunning. but in general, i have no idea what this was.
maybe multiple readings of this collection will benefit me better, but the first read went way over my head. some lyricism is stunning. but in general, i have no idea what this was.
March 26, 2016
Verse is memory turned around...
A warehouse of the remembered...
And too the forgotten...
And the consciously left out...
Description, diction, misuse...
The author decides what to use...
The poetry medium is deader...
Than the poet ever could be...
Except for me, always, always me...
So now, is this obvious work...
Drop dead, so not dangerous...
Trod through scenarios...
sun against son...
Guess which one won...
Or how in the end...
I ask the wayfarer to...
Wake me up when originality...
Is resurrected, I want to burn...
A warehouse of the remembered...
And too the forgotten...
And the consciously left out...
Description, diction, misuse...
The author decides what to use...
The poetry medium is deader...
Than the poet ever could be...
Except for me, always, always me...
So now, is this obvious work...
Drop dead, so not dangerous...
Trod through scenarios...
sun against son...
Guess which one won...
Or how in the end...
I ask the wayfarer to...
Wake me up when originality...
Is resurrected, I want to burn...
May 8, 2022
this book was so formative to my love (and understanding) of poetry when i first read it over four years ago. “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous” is still one of my all-time favorite poems—even if i found its novel adaptation lackluster. i think a little bit of the original magic is lost on me today (the first half of this was slower/less impactful than the second imo), but i love night sky with exit wounds nonetheless.
onto time is a mother!
onto time is a mother!
Read
November 8, 2022Paint me stupid but I understood nothing. Not one thing.
And I'm deeply ashamed of it. I've never felt this bad after completing a book for I could just not wrap my head around it.
Wtf is wrong with me!? This literally gave me excruciating headache.
Definitely going to read again sometime in future when I'm at peace.
November 08, 2022
And I'm deeply ashamed of it. I've never felt this bad after completing a book for I could just not wrap my head around it.
Wtf is wrong with me!? This literally gave me excruciating headache.
Definitely going to read again sometime in future when I'm at peace.
November 08, 2022
Read
August 1, 2022My favorite line
Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.
My favorite poem - Of Thee I Sing
We made it, baby. We’re riding in the back of the black limousine. They have lined the road to shout our names. They have faith in your golden hair & pressed grey suit. They have a good citizen in me. I love my country. I pretend nothing is wrong. I pretend not to see the man & his blond daughter diving for cover, that you’re saying my name & it’s not coming out like a slaughterhouse. I’m not Jackie O yet & there isn’t a hole in your head, a brief rainbow through a mist of rust. I love my country but who am I kidding? I’m holding your still-hot thoughts in, darling, my sweet, sweet Jack. I’m reaching across the trunk for a shard of your memory, the one where we kiss & the nation glitters. Your slumped back. Your hand letting go. You’re all over the seat now, deepening my fuchsia dress. But I’m a good citizen, surrounded by Jesus & ambulances. I love this country. The twisted faces. My country. The blue sky. Black limousine. My one white glove glistening pink - with all our American dreams.
Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.
My favorite poem - Of Thee I Sing
We made it, baby. We’re riding in the back of the black limousine. They have lined the road to shout our names. They have faith in your golden hair & pressed grey suit. They have a good citizen in me. I love my country. I pretend nothing is wrong. I pretend not to see the man & his blond daughter diving for cover, that you’re saying my name & it’s not coming out like a slaughterhouse. I’m not Jackie O yet & there isn’t a hole in your head, a brief rainbow through a mist of rust. I love my country but who am I kidding? I’m holding your still-hot thoughts in, darling, my sweet, sweet Jack. I’m reaching across the trunk for a shard of your memory, the one where we kiss & the nation glitters. Your slumped back. Your hand letting go. You’re all over the seat now, deepening my fuchsia dress. But I’m a good citizen, surrounded by Jesus & ambulances. I love this country. The twisted faces. My country. The blue sky. Black limousine. My one white glove glistening pink - with all our American dreams.
March 31, 2016
Read this one hundred times.
November 24, 2020
& there's nothing / more holy than holding / a man's heartbeat between / your teeth
November 27, 2022
✧ ↝ 4.5 stars
ocean vuong’s writing is always so incredibly beautiful and it is visible how this collection relates to his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
ocean vuong’s writing is always so incredibly beautiful and it is visible how this collection relates to his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
November 4, 2018
4/5stars
well this was infinitely better than most other poetry i've read in my life. but its still poetry lol i was lost for about 50% of it and everything went super over my head. BUT. stuff i DID understand, i quite liked. Excited to chat with Prof Vuong about his poetry this week!
well this was infinitely better than most other poetry i've read in my life. but its still poetry lol i was lost for about 50% of it and everything went super over my head. BUT. stuff i DID understand, i quite liked. Excited to chat with Prof Vuong about his poetry this week!
October 27, 2021
[3.5 stars] Vuong is a talented writer. His word choice is really stunning. The poems felt a bit hard to understand for me, but I appreciated how personal, almost confessional, they felt. Best read aloud.
Read
March 31, 2016Probably I shouldn't write this review until I reread this book. It's easy enough to do. One book from 35 poems. Probably I shouldn't write this because it came with such high expectations, which are, let's face it, a writer's worst enemies. Me, I'll take low expectations any day. If someone finds something good, I'll be happy. And maybe they will, too.
Ocean has a way with words. Words that demand attention. I still remember the Beloit Poetry Journal poem of his I read, "Telemachus." I loved that poem. And here it is, washed ashore in Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I hoped I would find another poem that I loved more, but I still loved this one best:
Telemachus
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city
beyond the shore is no longer
where he left it. Because the bombed
cathedral is now a cathedral
of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far
I might sink. Do you know who I am,
Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer
is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
with seawater. He is so still I think
he could be anyone’s father, found
the way a green bottle might appear
at a boy’s feet containing a year
he has never touched. I touch
his ears. No use. I turn him
over. To face it. The cathedral
in his sea-black eyes. The face
not mine but one I will wear
to kiss all my lovers good-night:
the way I seal my father’s lips
with my own and begin
the faithful work of drowning.
Wow. And the father theme is a painful refrain that keeps repeating in this book. Father and prison. Father and alcohol. Father and violence. The exit wounds are all over the page. Here he is again in a poem that landed in some magazine or other called The New Yorker:
Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuoung
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.
Some cool lines I jotted from the book, lines that sound like the ocean cupped to your ear:
"...the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders"
"Even my name knelt down inside me..."
"Found the way a green bottle might appear at a boy's feet, containing a year he has never touched"
"He moves like any other fracture, revealing the briefest doors..."
"...as the field shreds itself with cricket cries"
As you can see, OV knows his way around a word. He is a deft master of unexpected word pairs. I admit, it didn't always work and sometimes led to the big, "Huh?" but when it does work, it is rewarding work, well-worth sweating over.
And so I toil. And recommend YOU toil, too. Despite occasional misfires, some real winners here. And my old friend Telemachus, too. Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned...
Ocean has a way with words. Words that demand attention. I still remember the Beloit Poetry Journal poem of his I read, "Telemachus." I loved that poem. And here it is, washed ashore in Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I hoped I would find another poem that I loved more, but I still loved this one best:
Telemachus
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city
beyond the shore is no longer
where he left it. Because the bombed
cathedral is now a cathedral
of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far
I might sink. Do you know who I am,
Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer
is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
with seawater. He is so still I think
he could be anyone’s father, found
the way a green bottle might appear
at a boy’s feet containing a year
he has never touched. I touch
his ears. No use. I turn him
over. To face it. The cathedral
in his sea-black eyes. The face
not mine but one I will wear
to kiss all my lovers good-night:
the way I seal my father’s lips
with my own and begin
the faithful work of drowning.
Wow. And the father theme is a painful refrain that keeps repeating in this book. Father and prison. Father and alcohol. Father and violence. The exit wounds are all over the page. Here he is again in a poem that landed in some magazine or other called The New Yorker:
Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuoung
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.
Some cool lines I jotted from the book, lines that sound like the ocean cupped to your ear:
"...the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders"
"Even my name knelt down inside me..."
"Found the way a green bottle might appear at a boy's feet, containing a year he has never touched"
"He moves like any other fracture, revealing the briefest doors..."
"...as the field shreds itself with cricket cries"
As you can see, OV knows his way around a word. He is a deft master of unexpected word pairs. I admit, it didn't always work and sometimes led to the big, "Huh?" but when it does work, it is rewarding work, well-worth sweating over.
And so I toil. And recommend YOU toil, too. Despite occasional misfires, some real winners here. And my old friend Telemachus, too. Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned...
May 1, 2021
"𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦
𝑖𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑡'𝑠 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑑. & 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟,
𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑡
𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑"
"𝑄𝑢𝑖𝑐𝑘. 𝐶𝑎𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑓𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔?
𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠
𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒- 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛
𝑎𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡.
𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑚𝑒, 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘
𝑜𝑓 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔
& 𝑚𝑦 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑟𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔
𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑛 𝑓𝑙𝑎𝑔- 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘.
𝑇𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 & 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝐼 𝑙𝑒𝑓𝑡
𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑢𝑠, 𝑓𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑
𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑘𝑦
𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑜���𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑦 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑠.
𝑈𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑡.
𝑈𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑒 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑠
𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑒 𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑤
𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒: 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑥𝑖𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑠
𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦
𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑."
other favourites: Headfirst, Logophobia, Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong, To My Father / To My Future Son
my first poetry collection and i couldn't have chosen a better place to start than by Ocean Vuong, surely one of the best writers of this generation. i admire him so much and i'm in awe of the way he thinks, talks, writes, everything.
𝑖𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑡'𝑠 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑑. & 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟,
𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑡
𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑"
"𝑄𝑢𝑖𝑐𝑘. 𝐶𝑎𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑓𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔?
𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑠
𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒- 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛
𝑎𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡.
𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑚𝑒, 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘
𝑜𝑓 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔
& 𝑚𝑦 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑟𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔
𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑛 𝑓𝑙𝑎𝑔- 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘.
𝑇𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 & 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝐼 𝑙𝑒𝑓𝑡
𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑢𝑠, 𝑓𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑
𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑘𝑦
𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑜���𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑦 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑠.
𝑈𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑡.
𝑈𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑒 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑠
𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑒 𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑤
𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒: 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑥𝑖𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑠
𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦
𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑."
other favourites: Headfirst, Logophobia, Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong, To My Father / To My Future Son
my first poetry collection and i couldn't have chosen a better place to start than by Ocean Vuong, surely one of the best writers of this generation. i admire him so much and i'm in awe of the way he thinks, talks, writes, everything.
March 21, 2021
BRILLIANT 🙌
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