7/7/2023 0 Comments Ocean vuong exit woundsThere would be no Ocean Vuong if some of the most devastating events of the twentieth century had not taken place. “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. He lays out the basic tension of his origins most plainly in “Notebook Fragments,” in which he strips away any hedges from the basic problem and expresses it with rude simplicity: He obsesses–pleads–throughout these poems with his own ontology. His range extends from expressing ultimate philosophical questions to the tender eroticism of sexual intimacy. His skill with language is deft and agile, and it isn’t uncommon to find him at play with his words, batting them lightly like a tired kitten, just a line or two after he’s punched you in the chest with the grief and gravity of a phrase. Along the way he looks at the war, sex, family, depression, domestic violence, personhood. Night Sky concerns itself largely with origins and transitions, with the way identities and locations are always in a state of shifting from one thing to another. Vuong is a queer Vietnamese-American poet from New York whose family immigrated to the United States when he was two years old. Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) is a collection of quiet urgency, of grace in the midst of violence both physical and cultural, and of the unexpected ways we find beauty lying down with despair.
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