![]() ![]() ![]() Too often the underlying matter-the disrupted family, the sexual noir-overwhelms the poor verse. The emotion that seethes beneath, a rage more unnerving for largely being repressed, is far more articulate than anything he brings himself to admit. The poet was eleven before he learned to read, but this has more standing in his publicity than in poetry. Whatever private terrors lie within the poems, we get only the PG version, with X-rated snippets here and there. Little in Vuong’s work conveys the immigrant’s wrenching dislocation or permanent sense of loss, the rupture of identity between two worlds and the knowledge of being orphaned in both. In the June 2018 edition of The New Criterion I came across an omnibus poetry review titled “Old Wounds” in which the critic and poet William Logan wrote this of Ocean Vuong’s first book of poems, Night Sky with Exit Wounds: ![]()
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