5/20/2023 0 Comments Ocean vuong exit woundsThese are poems to sit with, allowing the feelings Vuong conveys to percolate to the surface and the evocative images to shimmer to their best advantage. This precision, with each word seemingly handled very carefully as it was placed on a page, between others equally carefully selected, is striking. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter,” he’s quoted as saying. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. He learned to read aged 11 and suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, according to the piece. In this Guardian profile, Vuong says that he was “a terrible student” at a rough school where “being a slight, queer, yellow boy, it was very easy to be picked on”. Or crystallised essences of emotions, surprising and somehow aptly rendered. To continue with our metaphor-trust us, nothing so awkward appears in Vuong’s work-these poems are exquisite jewels. (As is, incidentally, Mai Der Vang’s Afterland.) If you’re like us, picking up a collection like Night Sky With Exit Wounds is an easy and painless way to reenter this corner of the literary world. We blame memories of horrible effort required in high school to make sense of stuff from the distant past, but this is really, truly no excuse. We at Travelfish are prolific readers, but we often fall down when it comes to staying abreast of what’s happening in the poetry world.
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