Still in others, we see how the ideologies and assumptions at play behind the standard vision of America lead to pain and suffering to a lesser, yet still significant degree insofar as they seem to doom to failure any love that the speaker has for other men. On the side of the sacred or religious, there are each of the poem's connotations of otherworldly whiteness or purity, as well as the nun's immolation at the end of the poem. Night Sky With Exit Wounds Summary & Study Guide. At the same time that this destruction takes place, however, an intimate encounter is staged between a soldier and a woman in a hotel room that is interspersed with these images of destruction. Images of the Vietnam War, for example, are often laid out nakedly to convey the striking destruction of that conflict, but at the same time, they are often laid right up against images of passionate lovemaking, longing, or tenderness. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a book of great patience and intelligence and is worthy of the reader’s trust. Still, in other poems, Vuong adapts his forms to mimetically reproduce the feeling of a found object (like a letter in "My Father Writes from Prison" and the titular "Notebook Fragments"). For Vuong and his speaker, the body is the physical vessel that receives the multiple, … A number of poems in the collection deal with gay sexuality, love, and relationships, as well as what it means to be a man who loves other men. Because the city. All in all, the speaker seems quietly resigned to forget his father over time, though he knows this will never be possible—the resemblance and kinship he feels to a parent is too close. Vuong’s upbringing plays a key role in the subject matter of the poems in this collection, often making references to the fact that he was born on a rice farm in 1988 and spent a … Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016. The fact that these identical words bookend the poem both carries the finality of a religious incantation and gives the impression of a chance occurrence or coincidence, a complex feeling that is pulled off here to exquisite effect. Ocean Vuong is a master at intimately linking the content of his poems to their forms. Night Sky with Exit Wounds study guide contains a biography of Ocean Vuong, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Summary. More important to Vuong, however, is looking at how the heteronormative, white ideologies at work behind the American dream contribute to violence and erasure against himself and others like him. Here is the opening to “Telemachus”: Like any good son, I pull my father out. Vuong’s upbringing plays a key role in the subject matter of the poems in this collection, often making references to the fact that he was born on a rice farm in 1988 and spent a … Immigrant Haibun Lyrics. "In Vuong's "Night Sky," the entry and exit wounds are real, torn open by gunshot and "misfired" words, but his poems insist we can be made whole by rapture." Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a book of great patience and intelligence and is worthy of the reader’s trust. The poem follows all of the death, destruction, and chaos that evolved in Saigon on April 29, 1975, when the American military evacuated civilians and Vietnamese refugees from the city by helicopter, leaving the city to fall to North Vietnamese forces. In other poems, Vuong uses indentation and white space on the page to highlight the disconnect or distance between people or figures (such as in "Eurydice"). --San Francisco Chronicle "Vuong's major contribution in Night Sky With Exit Wounds is to push back against the inclination to let fear define the exile's life." This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Night Sky With Exit Wounds. In the collection's first section, the speaker describes his father at length as a tender and passionate lover to his mother ("A Little Closer to the Edge," "My Father Writes from Prison"). The body is the threshold across which meditation and introspection becomes action and speech, and it thus is the center of Vuong's poetic imagination. Even more complex, however, is the fact that these two alternate stories of the same day are also interweaved with lyrics from Irving Berlin's song "White Christmas"—also written in italics—which the epigraph tells us was the very song that was used as a signal for American forces to evacuate. In “Threshold,” the opening poem in Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, the narrator attests, “In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar.”. The poem begins with the lovers drinking champagne, and ends with the burning nun running "silently toward her god," both of which use the same language of opening. Notably, this divinity is not an easy or preferable divinity, but an awesome and terrible one. If one of Vuong's preoccupations in Night Sky with Exit Wounds is exploring multiplicity—both in the everyday and in one's various life experiences—then the body can be said to be the main tool by which he probes this idea of multiplicity. of the water, drag him by his hair. Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), winner of the 2017 T.S. That the sacred and the profane themselves become confused as ideas is especially reinforced by the same language of resignation being used to describe both the lovers and the nun: "Open, he says. The Question and Answer section for Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a great In poems like "Seventh Circle on Earth," this is on full display while we are also made to pay attention to the deadly grip that the American Dream still has on people that it victimizes ("Look how happy we are / to be no one / & still // American."). How does Vuong explore the idea of duality in Night Sky with Exit Wounds? Eliot Prize. This is a complex question because Vuong loads virtually every image in Night Sky with Exit Wounds with double meanings or alternate interpretations. Explain the importance of the body to Ocean Vuong in Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Summary The poem "Telemachus" is the second poem in Ocean Vuong 's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and it is the first poem in the first section proper. While it is unclear whether the father figure would even recognize the speaker in the present (per "Telemachus" and "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong"), the speaker focuses a great deal on his father. the waves rush in to erase. ― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. How does Vuong use form effectively to echo the content of the poems in Night Sky with Exit Wounds? of the water, drag him by his hair. Vuong chooses to emphasize the father figure nonetheless for a few important reasons. It follows the speaker as he drags his drowning and shot father from the ocean, attempts to resuscitate his father, and fails. Finally, in poems like "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," Vuong uses formal variation itself to create a rhythm and feeling of displacement that parallels the alienation felt by his speaker. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a 2016 collection of poetry by Vietnamese American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. Ocean Vuong is an assistant professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The road which leads me to you is safe even when it runs into oceans. "In Vuong's "Night Sky," the entry and exit wounds are real, torn open by gunshot and "misfired" words, but his poems insist we can be made whole by rapture." - … Regarding the use of lyrics from "White Christmas," a clear irony is present in that Vietnam only has snow in its cool northern region, so the use of the song in the context of Saigon in April is doubly out of place. Like “I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. In the collection, even the heteronormative, white American ideal as represented by Jackie Kennedy and John F. Kennedy is not safe, since their occupancy of this ideal leads to John's assassination ("Of Thee I Sing"). In Night Sky with Exit Wounds, America is both the agent which causes a great deal of harm and the balm which soothes its victims after they suffer at its hands. An aubade is a poem that is written to accompany the break of day, most commonly in the context of two lovers parting. It retells the classical story of Orpheus, a bard from Greek mythology, and his wife Eurydice, whom he descends to the underworld to retrieve. What is the speaker's relationship like with his father in Night Sky with Exit Wounds? After publication, the collection received much critical acclaim and in 2017, the book won the prestigious T.S. After paying his dues as the refugee troubadour of Burnings (2010), he honored the lives of gay suicides in No (2013). Its presence in the poem, nonetheless, is evocative of both the stubbornness of love and passion—even against the backdrops of war and violence—as well as the fragility of love and its ability to be torn apart at any second by something like war.

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