2025 read #22: Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

89 pages

Published 2016

Read March 14

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

For someone who has published poetry and occasionally flirts with calling myself a poet, I’ve read embarrassingly little. I read a fair bit of verse online, in tiny press publications and on social media, but even there, I don’t read as much as I did back in ’21 or ’22.

Ocean Vuong is one of our major contemporary poets, and someone I’ve never read before. I picked this collection because it’s the one my library had. The topics here are those expected of major contemporary poets: grief, identity, violence, trauma, eroticism, the elemental vastness of one’s parents. I say this without disparagement; these are paramount matters, and Vuong handles them with skill. He raises an archetype without ever feeling anodyne: “He moves like any / other fracture, revealing the briefest doors.” (From “Trojan.”)