Course:Night Sky With Exit Wounds: a poetry collection by Ocean Vuong
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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This 2016 poetry collection was my introduction to Saigon-born, New York-based poet Ocean Vuong (he/him). It’s his first collection of poetry, and he was 28 when it was released. When I picked the book up soon after its publication, I was still new to writing poetry and was studying the canon of older poets, who were almost always white and heterosexual. Ocean expanded the genre for me, as I saw that (published) poetry could be young. It could champion queer, BIPOC voices. It could seethe with emotion and relevance.
The poetry in this book is relentlessly sensorial and lush. Reading it, I felt intimately inside each moment, and yet that intimacy still held a kind of danger or fleetingness. There’s constant movement in Ocean’s poems, and this movement is often so seamless that it doesn’t immediately appear on the surface to me. Yet, he is constantly negotiating the difference between the narrator and everything/one else; between past and present. We traverse these borders by means of trap doors, falling from one thing to the next through the link of the sensorial. This excerpt from the poem “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (trigger warning for physical abuse) shows this technique, as it intertwines an experience of queer love with a horrible childhood memory:
I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night,
after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my
father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through
the walls. & so I learned— that a man in climax was the closest thing
to surrender.
The copy of this book in my home today is the first gift I gave to my partner. I purchased it from the City Lights bookstore on a trip to San Francisco. After browsing the store’s upstairs poetry nook for hours, it felt like most beautiful gift I could find.