The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. In “Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong,” a poem of fraught embodiment, the poet attempts to reach a kind of atonement with his own body, he writes, “The most beautiful part / of your body is wherever / your mother’s shadow falls” and continues, “Ocean. I wanted to follow it further, to drown alongside him as he attempts to fill his father’s dying body with breath, or even further back to the fall of Saigon where the lyrics of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” signal the beginning of the evacuation of Vietnamese refugees, through his boyhood and sexual awakening, and to some of the most tender moments of the collection where Vuong’s mother is evoked. I couldn’t not buy it, his voice was that haunting.
Vuong’s voice trembles with remarkable vulnerability I bought Night Sky With Exit Wounds after hearing Vuong read this year at a writing conference.
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