Night Sky with Exit Wounds

I didn’t know that Ocean Vuong was merely 23 years old upon publishing Night Sky with Exit Wounds when I read the book’s opening lines: “In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar.” I didn’t know this, and I’m glad I didn’t. For if I had, the lines of this first poem, “Threshold,” might have been emptied of their testimony to life experience and the whole manuscript’s maturity as reflected in tempered openness and exquisite poetic craft. But art comes to the artist without regard for time, and maturity is as much an act of will as it is a product of experience; this artist has embraced both in his youth, as evidenced in these poems. To date, he is already the recipient of several national awards including a Pushcart Prize and the author of two previously published chapbooks. Simply said, he has not suddenly risen to celebrity status in the world of poetry (if such a thing can be claimed), but has achieved this status gradually through multiple shorter publications and recognitions.

I didn’t know that Ocean Vuong was merely 23 years old upon publishing Night Sky with Exit Wounds when I read the book’s opening lines: “In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar.” I didn’t know this, and I’m glad I didn’t. For if I had, the lines of this first poem, “Threshold,” might have been emptied of their testimony to life experience and the whole manuscript’s maturity as reflected in tempered openness and exquisite poetic craft. But art comes to the artist without regard for time, and maturity is as much an act of will as it is a product of experience; this artist has embraced both in his youth, as evidenced in these poems. To date, he is already the recipient of several national awards including a Pushcart Prize and the author of two previously published chapbooks. Simply said, he has not suddenly risen to celebrity status in the world of poetry (if such a thing can be claimed), but has achieved this status gradually through multiple shorter publications and recognitions.

And why mention this? So that his artistry is celebrated not as a one-hit-wonder, but as the fine work of seasoned genius it is. Vuong is a dedicated student of his chosen craft as he demonstrates in a 2013 interview for Edward J. Rathke. The form of a poem, he states, is a “vehicle for the poem’s movement” and an “extension of the poem’s content.” He then goes on to explain that he writes with regard to visual space, considering a poem’s enjambment, line breaks, utterances, and stutters vital to its internal tension and conceit. For Vuong, the poem is a marriage between structure and subject matter.

This marriage and methodology is especially evident in poems such as “In Newport I Watch My Father Lay a Cheek to a Beached Dolphin’s Wet Back,” a poem written in what appears to be contrapuntal (but is not in content), the lines parted and variegated to mimic ocean waves. And these lines are not merely successful in their visual appeal and the rhythm this form facilitates, but also for their emotional tension and rich imagistic language; such as the tension and imagery in these opening lines of “Eurydice”:

It’s more like the sound
               a doe makes
when the arrowhead
              replaces the day
with an answer
             to the rib’s hollowed
hum.

Or the stunning narrative that unfolds at the beginning of “Always & Forever”:

Open this when you need me most,
      he said, as he slid the shoe box, wrapped

in duct tape, beneath my bed. His thumb,
      still damp from the shudder between mother’s

thighs, kept circling the mole above my brow.
      The devil’s eye blazed between his teeth

or lighting a joint? It doesn’t matter. Tonight
      I wake & mistake the bathwater wrung

from mother’s hair for his voice.

These poems, like most of the poems in this collection, explore love, loss, and violence—specifically between fathers, sons, and lovers. He captures the spirit of youth while dancing delicately over the seams that separate naivety from experience, violating romance with passions, and sentimentality with experience. “Dearest Father” he prays in “Prayer for the Newly Damned”:

forgive me for I have seen.
Behind the wooden fence, a field lit
with summer, a man pressing a shank
to another man’s throat. Steel turning to light
on sweat-slick neck. Forgive me
for not twisting this tongue into the shape
of Your name. For thinking:
this must be how every prayer
begins—the word Please cleaving
the wind into fragments, into what
a boy hears in his need to know
how pain blesses the body back
to its sinner.

This book is not for the innocent, or even the repentant. It’s for the sinner seeking grace in raindrops, burnings, the body of a lover, war-torn memories, and “the cigarette floating from” a man’s lips in “To my Father / To my Future Son.” These poems are sensuous and startling from line to line, poem to poem, page to page. I read these poems the way dark chocolate and smooth wine linger on the palette and satisfy something much more ravenous than hunger. I read them for their sex and anger, their gravity and freshness, their desperation and forgiveness, their secret marriage of darkness and light. In Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong carries his reader through this truth and its penalty: in the body, where everything has a price, we are all beggars.