Copyright Date:
2016
Edition Date:
2016
Release Date:
04/05/16
Pages:
viii, 89 pages
ISBN:
1-556-59495-X
ISBN 13:
978-1-556-59495-3
Dewey:
811
LCCN:
2015038100
Dimensions:
20 cm.
Language:
English
Reviews:
Publishers Weekly
(Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into-and culls from-individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the collection, as when he writes, -Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won-t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.- There are times when Vuong-s intense sincerity edges too far toward sentimentality: -Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn./ Say autumn despite the green/ in your eyes.- Yet these moments feel difficult to avoid in a book whose speakers risk so much raw emotion: -7:18am. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message. Couldn-t listen/ to all of it. That makes three this year.- By juxtaposing startling observations with more common images, Vuong forges poems that feel familiar, yet honest and original. (Apr.)
Reviewing Agencies: - Find Other Reviewed Titles
Publishers Weekly
(Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
Bibliography Index/Note:
Includes bibliographical references (page 87).
The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016 "There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things."--New York Times "From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--New Yorker "Extraordinary."--Los Angeles Times "Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."--Boston Globe Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"--and very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant." Torso of Air Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night--sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side-- Waiting.
Threshold
Telemachus
Trojan
Aubade with burning city
A little closer to the edge
Immigrant Haibun
Always & forever
My father writes from prison
Headfirst
In Newport I watch my father lay his cheek to a beached dolphin's wet back
The gift
Self-portrait as exit wounds
Thanksgiving 006
Homwrecker
Of thee I sing
Because it's summer
Into the breech
Anaphora as coping mechanism
Seventh circle of Earth
On Earth we're briefly gorgeous
Eurydice
Untitled (blue, green, and brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952
Queen under the hill
Torso of air
Prayer for the newly dammed
To my father/to my future son
Deto(nation)
Ode to masturbation
Notebook fragments
The smallest measure
Daily bread
Odysseus Redux
Lagaphobia
Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong
Devotion.
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