Night Sky with Exit Wounds

These poems contain a lot: violence, softness, darkness, and light rinse through the pages in an emotional dirge. They deal with trauma experienced and inherited, a burning of homeland and a loss of place, a struggle with identity, loss, physicality, and love. There were some beautiful lines that I will keep with me, e.g.: “Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough to slip through”; “How sweet. That rain. How something that lives to fall can be nothing but sweet.” But, there weren't any full poems that really knocked me out, just moments.

Turn back & find the book I left
for us, filled
with all the colors of the sky
forgotten by gravediggers.
Use it.
Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were: the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.

The dedication to Night Sky With Exit Wounds reads: “for my mother [& father]” and the brackets between love for mother and love for father is one of the strongest threads in the weave of this collection of poetry. Ocean (I use his first name because I feel like I know him now and I've already fallen in love with his author photo & it's a beautiful name too) writes sharply about the deep unembraceable hunger for love and touch and wanting that comes with a father that hits your mother and hugs you with liquor on his breath and scares you with his weapons and his physicality. But he also has that poets eye, compassionate and cosmic, that sees his father as the survivor of a terrible war and a terrible time.

Sexuality is ever present and always questioned with suspicion in these poems. Straight women worry about becoming their mother in their relationships. Straight men worry about whether they are becoming their fathers. Gay men worry about whether they are their mother who sublimates her self for a man or their father who possesses another (not all straight relationships are like this, but I don't see the value in pretending like most are not).

Mixed race and immigrant children take the hard work of coexistence and assimilation into their bodies. The political status of your people are the winds that can blow self-esteem and security away. When I'm with white people, I say that I'm Mexican-American. When I'm with Latinos, I say nothing at all, because the real truth of it is that my home culture is neither Mexican nor American, it is the negotiated culture of my parent's marriage.

The cover photo is of Ocean as a young boy seated between two women. On his shirt is written—I gasped out loud when I made out the faded words—”I Love Daddy.” White bars with the title and author hide their eyes, echoing documents censored by the military, but also maybe protecting the people in the photos from being completely seen. You can still make out the scared expression on the little boy's face.

“If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming.”

Boy, are the abandonment trauma, gun violence, guilt over sex and internalized homophobia strong in this one!

This been said, this little book is a delight, in spite of all the sadness gore, so gently embroidered with many, mant excerpts of excellent wordsmithery.

I cannot wait to read what else Ocean Vuong becomes as he matures with years and craft.

4.75 stars