Night Sky with Exit Wounds

March 21, 2016
In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into—and culls from—individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the collection, as when he writes, “Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won’t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.” There are times when Vuong’s intense sincerity edges too far toward sentimentality: “Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn./ Say autumn despite the green/ in your eyes.” Yet these moments feel difficult to avoid in a book whose speakers risk so much raw emotion: “7:18am. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message. Couldn’t listen/ to all of it. That makes three this year.” By juxtaposing startling observations with more common images, Vuong forges poems that feel familiar, yet honest and original.

Starred review from June 15, 2016

Vuong was named one of this year's Whiting Award recipients, and this debut collection (his chapbooks include Burnings, an American Library Association (ALA) Over the Rainbow selection) shows why. The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible. Born in Ho Chi Minh City in the late 1980s, Vuong can reignite scenes from his country's recent traumas; as Saigon falls, "Milkflower petals in the street/ like pieces of a girl's dress" drift over the dead and injured, and the city lies "so white it is ready for ink" ("White Christmas" really played on the airwaves at the time). Elsewhere, the pain and glory of young love and young life emerge ("Show me how ruin makes a home/ out of hip bones...// teach me to hold a man the way thirst// holds water"). VERDICT Highly recommended.

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