yatima: (Default)
yatima ([personal profile] yatima) wrote in [community profile] 50books_poc2017-09-04 04:04 pm

Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016

Believe the hype. This is the best book of poetry I have read in years, dense with precisely described emotion. It reminded me of the first time I read Plath's Ariel:

Not
a piano—but a mare
draped in a black sheet. White mouth
sticking out like a fist. I kneel
at my beast. The sheet sunken
at her ribs.

A side-note: in my Honours English class back in nineteen ninety-mumble, our great professor Bruce Gardiner wasted most of a tutorial trying to get me and the rest of my virginal cohort to understand Yeats "The Song of the Wandering Aengus" as the poet going outside at night for a wank. One of Vuong's poems here is helpfully titled "Ode to Masturbation," which should save many graduate student hours.
surpassingly: (Default)

[personal profile] surpassingly 2017-09-05 01:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you for this review -- and for all the other ones you have been posting to the comm! I really appreciate them.

(And now I really need to get this book!)