“Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” gives us two thoughts on the body:
The pain, though, associated “with bruises” becomes a wish for a violent blessing in “Prayer for the Newly Damned”:īut, finally, the grand coda of meditating on the body-in a book that’s filled with the questioning and rejection that accompanies exile-is one of family, affection, and an embrace of a fraught, broken world that insists on loss and inspires grief.
In “Torso of Air,” Vuong invites the reader to imagine longed-for happiness, but before happiness can be imagined, he offers this necessary-to-the-poem supposition: My favorite poems that explore the body occur near the end of the collection. When you think that Vuong’s magic in reimagining the familiar is exhausted, he changes his spell more. Then, in “Eurydice,” one of several poems that invokes and queers the classical tradition, the disillusioned speaker imagines the body as incorporeal: “I thought love was real / & the body imaginary. 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
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