Award-winning, 2016-published Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a beautiful collection of often startling poems by Vietnamese-born, American-raised refugee Ocean Vuong. Spanning war, the fall of Saigon, gay love, families and much more, the poems may traverse sometimes familiar ground, but they offer fresh perspectives using language that sparkles as if its very words were diamonds.
We at Travelfish are prolific readers, but we often fall down when it comes to staying abreast of what’s happening in the poetry world. We blame memories of horrible effort required in high school to make sense of stuff from the distant past, but this is really, truly no excuse. If you’re like us, picking up a collection like Night Sky With Exit Wounds is an easy and painless way to reenter this corner of the literary world. (As is, incidentally, Mai Der Vang’s Afterland.)
To continue with our metaphor—trust us, nothing so awkward appears in Vuong’s work—these poems are exquisite jewels. Or crystallised essences of emotions, surprising and somehow aptly rendered.
In this Guardian profile, Vuong says that he was “a terrible student” at a rough school where “being a slight, queer, yellow boy, it was very easy to be picked on”. He learned to read aged 11 and suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, according to the piece. “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter,” he’s quoted as saying. This precision, with each word seemingly handled very carefully as it was placed on a page, between others equally carefully selected, is striking.
These are poems to sit with, allowing the feelings Vuong conveys to percolate to the surface and the evocative images to shimmer to their best advantage.
Consider “Threshold”, the first poem:
“On my knees,
I watched, through the keyhole, not the man showering but the rain falling through him; guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders.”
Or Trojan:
“The dress petaling off him like the skin of an apple.”
Or Thanksgiving 2006:
“Brooklyn’s too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.”
My mother said I could be anything
I wanted—but I chose to live.”
One of our immediate favourites was Notebook Fragments, a collection of disparate snippets, just as the title suggests:
“Even sweetness can scratch the throat, so stir the sugar well.—Grandma
…
An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.”
A note on whether to go e-reader or paper: We could not get our Kindle to render the text small enough to accurately reflect the line settings printed on paper, so shallow indents were shown where line breaks should have been. If you have the time to wait for it, we’d suggest buying the hard copy.
Buy online: Amazon | Book Depository | Barnes & Noble |
108 results found
By George Orwell
By Emma Larkin
By Charmaine Craig
By Amitav Ghosh
By Thant Myint-U
By Andrew Marshall
By Walter Mason
By Madeleine Thien
By Laura Jean McKay
By Sebastian Strangio
By Lawrence Osborne
By Steven W. Boswell
By Jon Swain
By Francoise Bizot
By Colin McPhee
By Eka Kurniawan
By Louise Doughty
By Leila S. Chudori
By Richard Lloyd Parry
By Elizabeth Pisani
By Simon Winchester
By Tash Aw
By Jock Serong
By Tim Hannigan
By Lawrence Blair
By Jan Russell (editor)
By Alfred Russel Wallace
By Andrea Hirata
By Christopher J. Koch
By Pramoedya Ananta Toer
By Cameron Forbes
By Joshua Kurlantzick
By Mai Der Vang
By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid
By Colin Cotterill
By Christopher Kremmer
By Colin Cotterill
By Anne Fadiman
By Peter Carey
By Tash Aw
By Tan Twan Eng
By Tash Aw
By Selina Siak Chin Yoke
By Kevin Kwan
By Lee Kuan Yew
By Jing-Jing Lee
By Zhang Ruihe and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
By Jeremy Tiang
By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
By Cheryl Lu-Tien Tan
By Jeremy Tiang
By Balli Kaur Jaswal
By Sonny Liew
By Cyril Wong
By Isa Kamari (translated by Alfian Sa'at)
By Chris Flynn
By Alex Kerr
By Maryvelma O’Neil
By Lucinda Riley
By S.P. Somtow
By Carol Hollinger
By M.R Kukrit Pramoj
By Rattawut Lapcharoensap
By David Thompson
By J. Antonio
By Alex Garland
By Andy Ricker with JJ Goode
By Joshua Kurlantzick
By Richard Flanagan
By Prabda Yoon
By Paolo Bacigalupi
By Philip Cornwel-Smith
By Neil Sheehan
By Walter Mason
By Norman Lewis
By Graham Holliday
By Andrew X. Pham
By Emily Maguire
By Thi Bui
By Marguerite Duras
By Christopher Goscha
By Graham Greene
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
By Bao Ninh
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
By Tim O’Brien
By Neil Sheehan
By Elizabeth Becker
By Anthony Bourdain
By Rebecca Solnit
By Tiziano Terzani
By Joe Studwell
By William Finnegan
By Michael Vatikiotis
By Rolf Potts
By Elizabeth Becker
By Simon Winchester
By Alain de Botton
By Jamie James
By Paul Theroux
By Elizabeth Gilbert