Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds Reaches the U.K.

The Guardian's Sandeep Parmar reviews Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds, noting that an emphasis on the poet's biography "risks detracting from the book’s literary and political elements." The book has just been released by Cape Poetry in the U.K., following much success stateside. More:

Balancing memory and silence with erudition, Vuong’s poetry resists being so easily pinned down.

Poetry as song, originating in lyric, preoccupies the book’s opening poem “Threshold”. The father’s singing in the shower – and a son’s surreptitious listening – form an invocation for the poet.

I watched through the keyhole, not

the man showering, but the rain

falling through him: guitar strings snapping

over his globed shoulders.

He was singing, which is why

I remember it. His voice –

it filled me to the core

like a skeleton.

The poem crosses several thresholds – a relationship between father and son, especially – and is suspended between two voices: one’s own and another animated by a shared longing. For the poet, “the cost / of entering a song” is to “lose your way back”. Vuong invokes the myth of the lyric poet Orpheus and is beguiled by a father whose guitar strings (a lyre of sorts) break over the body like water. Along the same mythical line, he writes in “Eurydice”: “It’s not / about the light – but how dark / it makes you depending / on where you stand.” Vuong’s bold use of mythology defamiliarises; he inhabits these tales in ways that are surprising and instructive. Myth becomes a way to enter the self but also the frame of language. Imagining himself as Eurydice in “Notebook Fragments”, he wryly notes, “If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here.”

Read the full review at The Guardian.