The body, then, is a site of desire, knowing, and loss in “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”: Then, in “Headfirst,” the body is violence: “the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting.” “Into the Breach,” one of Vuong’s many poems exploring queer desire and sex, frames the body as refuge:īut the destruction of queer bodies (queer bodies in love)-specifically the 2011 murder of Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw by immolation in their Dallas home in 2011-becomes the scaffolding upon which the haunting “Seventh Circle of Earth” is built. In “Immigrant Haibun,” the speaker wonders, “Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish,” and we realize that the known world gives us access to the persistent unknown. Vuong begins his book with a poem that invokes liminality, betweeness-“Threshold”-that itself begins with the body: “In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar.” The body here welcomes commerce, desire, risk, reward-all concerns of later poems. Take the familiar topos of the body-something that we all “know,” but also the source of constant mystery and discovery.

His poems are events: beautifully sad, violently sexy, and politically poignant. And while these topics may be familiar areas for the poet to explore, Vuong’s poems defamiliarize the familiar, inviting the reader to discover what it’s like to navigate relentless newness.

Ocean Vuong’s stunning debut collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds meditates on belonging and exile, fathers and sons, the body of language and the language of the body, violence and desire. Septemin Reviews tagged Douglas Ray / Ocean Vuong by Kristina Marie Darling

The night sky with exit wounds