The “dark colt paused,” the guitar strings over “globed shoulders,” and that wide-eyed, grim conclusion: “Threshold” at once displays Vuong’s talent for imagery, attention to craft, and his capacity to bring forth a bitter, vulnerable voice to life’s ups and downs. The violation that closes this first poem opens the questions that fire Night Sky: To what extent must the trauma of family and the irruptions of migration be carried forth across generations? What does it take to break the chains, and what are the costs to this severance? Finally, what is worth holding onto?
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.” From his knees, he watches a man singing and showering through a bathroom keyhole, “the rain / falling through him: guitar strings snapping / over his globed shoulders,” all the way to a chilling denouement: Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016.
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