Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong review – migration, America and Vietnam

It is tempting to read Ocean Vuong’s poetry with his life story in mind. Glimpses of it appear throughout his Forward prize-nominated debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds: Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and at the age of two, after a year in a refugee camp, he emigrated to Hartford, Connecticut with six members of his family. Several poems resurrect violence from before the poet’s birth, in particular the end of the Vietnam war with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Complex figures, displaced by war, haunt the book: an absent, tormented father and a beloved mother. Vuong’s intimate lyrical voice, his precise, stark imagery and engagement with gay sexuality construct a familiar story of loss, as well as the immigrant’s precarious transnational identity. But pointing to the biography alongside Vuong’s stellar rise – from the first literate person in his family to a lauded, prize-winning poet – risks detracting from the book’s literary and political elements. 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.