NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, released in 2016, is Ocean’s second major volume of poetry, and returning to it now, in 2021, reiterates just how fine is his gift. This is the work of a gifted cantor, singing of pain, singing of healing.’ Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Vuong's perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. But they can also create strange lullabies he recalls from the past, his past, our past. His poems can arrest the movement of our eyes, forcing them to accept the wrong that cannot be righted. Ocean Vuong expresses the mind of a refugee as defined as any poet of our time. So for those of us who experienced the Vietnam of which he speaks these poems are pockets of pain and renewed compassion. And now, years away from that fetid error, his poems ask, if not force, us to recall that cancer that will never go away. He was born in Saigon in 1988, well after the US withdrawal of troops from that grossly wrong war, but his parents and grandparents carry the napalm smells and bitter battles in every cell of their bodies: Vuong's inheritance. Ocean Vuong is Vietnamese, now living and writing and teaching in Massachusetts. Likely for most these poems he collectively and intuitively titles BURNINGS will be simply the virtuosic, luminous constructions of a vividly experienced/inherited life.

In 2010 Ocean Vuong offered his first collection of poems – BURNINGS – and this reviewer wrote the following: ‘It is very difficult to read the poetry of Ocean Vuong: he gets inside the marrow and hides there for even a few moldy moments of memories that we've tried to erase. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier.

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Night sky with exit wounds amazon