At this introductory stage, the speaker (who remains consistent and highly parallel to Ocean Vuong's self throughout the majority of the collection, only clearly shifting in a few poems) is still a disengaged witness, one who is learning to understand his body by observing and writing about those bodies and people who are close to him (i.e., his father). The poems analyzed in this Note are grouped by section, beginning with "Threshold." Like the collection's epigraph from Chinese poet Bei Dao ("The landscape crossed out with a pen / reappears here"), this poem sheds light on the ways that both the body and this literal first poem in the collection are different kinds of thresholds, marking the boundaries between interiority and exteriority, subjective investment and objective witness, and memory and experience. The collection as a whole is a haunting testimony to the violences of history and memory, but also an incantatory performance of trauma and pain that allows the victims of these forces to be seen fully in the light, unforgotten and recognized in writing. Considered as a complete body of work, these poems shed light on Ocean Vuong's preoccupation with the body as both a site of potential and trauma, the weight of past war and abuse that constantly weighs on those affected by these experiences, the interlocking of the mythical and the personal, the conflicting and intersectional identities that LGBTQ+ people of color must straddle in America, the tensions between migration and citizenship, and the ways in which individuals connect to or diverge from their parents. In total, the collection is comprised of 35 poems, and it is split into three full sections, as well as a fourth section containing only the collection's first poem, "Threshold." This Note addresses a representative sample of 16 poems at length, but because many of the poems' themes connect, repeat, and intersect in important ways, every poem in the collection will be addressed. This ClassicNote focuses on the poems contained in Ocean Vuong's collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016).
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