Even today, the idea of him as a professional poet mystifies his relatives. Yet Ocean Vuong was the first in his family to read any language properly. The New Yorker described Vuong’s writing like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. He writes about his earliest sexual encounters in the baseball field behind the dugout / flecked with newports torn condoms, and of friends who die of overdoses. Vuong depicts his mother at her job in the nail salon, the scent of chemicals and sweat ever present. His gift to his son in “Always & Forever” is a Colt. The absent father looms, sometimes malevolent, sometimes kind, almost always violent. He was imprisoned soon after the family’s arrival in the US in 1990 for beating Ocean Vuong’s mother. Ocean Vuong’s father did not die on the shores of Vietnam. I kneel beside him to see how farīa? But the answer never comes. Through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail Ocean Vuong imagines his father as a prisoner-of-war, in grey overalls reeking of gasoline or lying face-down on a Vietnamese beach. He has the power to imagine himself in Saigon as the first shell flashes or afloat in Ha Long Bay where only the dead look up to the sky. These poems are based on stories his mother and grandmother told. Ocean Vuong was born in 1988, too young to have experienced war himself. His cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stonesĪs the traffic guards unstraps his holster.Ī military truck speeds through the intersection, children He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips. It was Irving Berlin’s song, “White Christmas.” So began the fall of Saigon. In “Aubade with Burning City,” Vuong uses the signal devised by US forces to mark the evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees.

Then Ocean Vuong adds his own form of alchemy to transform the whole into fire. These are powerful poems that meld facts with family history. Night Sky with Exit Wounds addresses the war in its first section.

For Americans like me coming of age in the 1970s, the Vietnam War dominates my conception. The challenge of any list of this nature is somehow to truly understand a country’s values, culture and people. Words Without Borders lists Night Sky with Exit Wounds as 1 of 39 must-read books from Vietnam and its diaspora. Among poets, his is a household name.įor me, Night Sky with Exit Wounds would be my entry point into Vietnam, a way to prepare for our trip around the world. Eliot Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, and the 2017 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. For this collection, Vuong won the Whiting Award, the T.S. At the time of Wenger’s interview, Ocean Vuong had just published his first book, a poetry collection called Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

Night sky with exit wounds poems