Night Sky With Exit Wound by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s voice in both tentative and strong, vulnerable and open. And he brings out this vulnerability in the reader—holds out his hand to us and, when we take it, yanks us into his pain and wonder at the world. Night Sky With Exit Wounds includes many of Ocean’s classics. It was published in 2016 and has been followed by other books, but there are poems in this collection which will never let go of the reader. Buy here.

From “Thanksgiving 2006”

Brooklyn’s too cold tonight

& all my friends are three years away.

My mother said I could be anything

I wanted—but I chose to live.

On the stoop of an old brownstone,

a cigarette flares, then fades.

I walk to it: a razor

sharpened with silence . . .

From “To My Father / To My Future Son”

. . . Turn back & find the book I left

for us, filled

with all the colors of the sky

forgotten by gravediggers.

Use it.

Use it to prove how the stars

were always what we knew

they were: the exit wounds

of every

misfired word.

From “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”

. . . Ocean,

are you listening? The most beautiful

part of your body is wherever

your mother’s shadow falls.

Here’s the house with childhood

whittled down to a single red trip wire.

Don’t worry. Just call it horizon

& you’ll never reach it . . .