Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Paperback, 89 pgs, Pub April 5th 2016 by Copper Canyon Press, ISBN 155659495X, Lit Awards: T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (2018), Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2017), Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Poetry (2016)

Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection. 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.

Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952)

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.

Rothko's 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.

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 is what we call a ‘literary light.’



Tweet