Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)
In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.
After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?
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