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This is the first full-length collection by Ocean Vuong, a rather thoughtless writer who is careless with words and who has never crossed a pathos he didn't immediately take. Voung has a second-rate imagination that never goes beyond his favorite subject, which is Vuong (see his New Yorker poem, "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," which is literally addressed to himself, as an example). Page after page exhibits poor writing: in "Prayer for the Newly Damned" he writes "what becomes of the shepherds/ when the sheep are cannibals?" Nothing happens to the shepherds when the sheep are cannibals; the word he meant to use but did not is "carnivorous" or "carnivores." Patterns emerge. Vuong chooses words with as much accuracy as a blindfolded child pinning a tail on a donkey. Take a recent poem of his not in this collection, "Tell Me Something Good," which goes "his bald head ringed with red hair, like a planet on fire." If the planet were on fire, which is impossible of course, but no matter the inane metaphor, the planet would be engulfed in fire, not ringed, which suggests a different, non-engulfing image. Or this trite simile from "Aubade with Burning City": "On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard for the first time." Every line of every poem sounds like it means something, until one actually dissects it and realizes there is nothing underneath the thick sentimentality. (One might also note that reviews rarely engage with the poems on a line-by-line basis, which would reveal their shallowness.) And every line is so overwrought as to be insincere: "For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep." Vuong is almost thirty; that previous example is not what I consider to be worthy of a so-called emerging poet.

Though Vuong is not emerging. This is his third book if we count his two chapbooks, which we should because they are not much slimmer than this collection. I don't think Vuong will ever get better. He has his market--which I imagine overlaps with buyers of Thomas Kinkade paintings or Precious Moments figurines--and he is easily marketable (and exotifiable: publications love to make note of his unusual name and his concocted backstory, which often becomes the focus instead of the poems).

Anyway, recommended if you like poems that seem like they just peed themselves in the corner of the room.