Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

[Fr. Andrew]

I'm doing a terrible job of keeping up with my goal of twenty poetry books this year. This is book 3 and March is almost over! Well, hopefully I'll catch up, and what matters is the goal, not the completing it, I guess.

I spent a lot of time with Ocean Vuong's writing these past few weeks. The man's work is poetry, all the way around. Along with Night Sky With Exit Wounds, I also read On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, his novel, and the two books are waters of the same ocean. I didn't have any trouble keeping them separate, but they didn't need to be so. This is the same sensual, fluid language in either case. The narrative of the novel was a web, much like poetry is. It must be said, though, like all poetry I seem to really enjoy lately, I often had little idea where I was, where I could be found, in his maze of beautiful images, but only in the poetry.

How to talk about this volume? Themes of death and grief, of family, of violence, of ambiguous filial love...these were all presented in terms of the visceral, the bodily, the sticky and smelly and juicy and both the appealing and the repugnant, at least to these sensitive nerves, and I relish every moment I spent with these poems.

Taking a look at Eurydice (see: https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...), we see the death and violence, and the radio harkens to other poems in the collection, regarding the Vietnam/U.S. war and a resulting death in the family. With beauty Vuong breaks our limbs: "Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky."

One thing I love about poetry is that it encourages me to see past how stupid I feel when reading it, because I don't fully understand the author's intentions or messages, because in the end I'm not necessarily meant to. Poetry is intensely personal, an attempt to past complicated, musical mindwaves into language, a language ill-equipped for clarity of such complexities...and ultimately, it's the music itself that matters, the emotional surge that really can't be clearly articulated. And thank goodness that language is an effective tool (ironically) for that.

5/5

[Sarah]

What a lovely review. Thanks Andrew.
Thanks also for the link -- I have to admit I'm one of the very few poetry lovers who hasn't yet read Ocean Vuong, until now! Beautiful poem. Love how he repeats "depending on where you stand."

[Jenna]

Thanks for sharing this, Andrew. Quite a bit of time has passed since I read this book, so it was nice to be reminded of its power. I admit I'm generally a sucker for books about "ambiguous filial love." And your last paragraph here is great.