'the book brims with precise, surreal, erotic imagery': New Statesman Reads Ocean Vuong, Adam O’Riordan, & Colette Bryce

Paul Batchelor reviews Ocean Vuong's poetry debut at New Statesman, a collection that Batchelor writes, "has already won several major awards...It’s easy to see why." He explains that Vuong's imaginative, unusual approach to poetry is in part because of his skilled imagination and his unconventional childhood. "...Vuong possesses a large and unusual imagination, but the road he has taken to poetry is also a factor: he was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the US after a spell in a refugee camp; he is also gay." From there: 

Being a Trump-voter’s worst nightmare seems to have provided him with a unique and often comic perspective on Western language and life:

A pillaged village is a fine example of perfect rhyme. He said that.
He was white. Or maybe, I was just beside myself, next to him.
Either way, I forgot his name by heart.

Inevitably, given its ambition, this is an uneven collection. Some poems are overwhelmed by their subjects (in particular a mawkish poem about 9/11), and Vuong sometimes falls short in his reach for the grand Rilkean note. In “Into the Breach” the speaker asks: “But what if I broke through / the skin’s thin page / anyway / & found the heart / not the size of a fist / but your mouth opening / to the width of Jerusalem. What then?’’ To which the reader can only say, well, what then indeed?

But these lines are immediately followed by a more subtly ambiguous observation: “To love another / man – is to leave / no one behind / to forgive me. / I want to leave / no one behind.” Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a remarkable debut. Where Vuong is headed is anyone’s guess, but you’ll want to go with him.

Read on at New Statesman.