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Note to self: If Orpheus was a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here. � from Notebook Fragments

There’s a photograph on the jacket of Ocean Vuong’s debut poetry collection of a small boy sitting on a wooden bench. Encircled by the arms of two women in summery cottons, he gazes steadily at the camera. The elegance is deceptive: it was taken when the family were living in poverty in a refugee camp in the Philippines, en route for the US, after being expelled from Vietnam. Vuong, the only child in the three-generation exodus, was two years old. A fellow refugee was bartering photographs for food. “That picture cost my family three tins of rice, according to my mother,� he says. “Each of us gave up our ration just to be seen.�

I bought Night Sky With Exit Wounds upon the recommendation of Shamina. I had never heard of Ocean Vuong, let alone this particular collection and was quite surprised to see that a bunch of my friends here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ have read it as well. I must’ve completely missed the “hypeâ€�. I found Vuong’s collection to be quite confusing. I can definitely see it improving upon a reread and upon researching more about him and his family history. Just reading some articles on him for this review, helped me understand his poems much better.

In his telling, Vuong’s life story begins two generations before he was born, when his American grandfather, a Michigan farm boy who “wanted to be Miles Davis�, joined the US navy with his trumpet in his backpack and was posted to Vietnam, where he fell in love with “an illiterate girl from the rice paddies�. This translates, in a piece called Notebook Fragments, as: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.�

By the time the family were reunited, his mother was an adult. She had given birth to Ocean when she was 18, and was washing men’s hair in a Saigon salon when a policeman realised that she was of mixed race and therefore working illegally under Vietnamese law. The whole family was evacuated to the Philippines while the Salvation Army processed their claim for admission to the US. After eight months in limbo they were moved on to Hartford, Connecticut, where Vuong’s father quickly disappeared, leaving him to be raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt.

His mother, a manicurist, gave him the name of Ocean. During a conversation with a customer, Vuong’s mother pronounced the word “beach� as “bitch�. The customer suggested she use the word “ocean� to substitute for “beach�. After learning the definition of the word ocean—as a body of water which connects the United States and Vietnam—she renamed him Ocean. [If we make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster.]

Favorites include “My Father Writes From Prison�, “In Newport I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek To A Beached Dolphin’s Wet Back�, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous� and “Daily Bread�. I just realised that those are all poems concerning his father, his search for a lost father figure. How can this collection be so full of fathers when Vuong grew up in a household of women? “Western mythology is so charged with the father,� he says. “Personally, I’m always asking who’s my father. Like Homer, I felt I’d better make it up. The Japanese have a word for it: yugen, when you have so little you have to imagine it.�

Overall, I am very happy that I checked out this poetry collection. I can definitely see myself reading more from Vuong in the future. [ For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep. ]

// Book #5 for BTAT 2018!