Dearest Annika,

I was drawn towards Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds as if by magnetic attraction. One slow morning in the local bookstore, I felt a gravitational pull towards its soothing blue cover—depicting a faded family photograph—and towards the highly original poetry composed within. Thumbing through its pages over the coming days, weeks, and months, I discovered within a great depth of sadness but also a heartbreaking beauty. That delicate dance of light and dark

In ‘To My Father / To My Future Son’ for example, Vuong writes:

Turn back & find the book I left

for us, filled

with all the colors of the sky

forgotten by gravediggers.

Use it.

Use it to prove how the stars

were always what we knew

they were: the exit wounds

of every

misfired word.

Navigating both personal history and mythological history, Vuong deftly plumbs the depths of emotion throughout this collection—which reads like an uncaging of the heart. And, in doing so, the talented Vietnamese American poet inks a new kind of language. One in which the blank space on the page becomes almost as significant as the words themselves. 

And I find myself wondering: where does poetry reside in the body?

x Rosie

…

Dearest Rosie, 

I've carried this book around with me for over a year now. It came with me while we moved between many houses and was one of the titles I chose not to pack into a box when we moved into temporary accommodation after the floods. I just knew it needed to be with me when I gave birth to my son. And it was. On the nightstand in the very same room. And his name too, Ocean as a middle. I read pages out loud mostly in the mornings during his first few weeks on Earth and so I think it will always be a truly sentimental title for me. 

                Summer in the mind

God opens his other eye:

                two moons in the lake. 

Indeed the colour of the cover is what drew me in too, the softest of blues, the exact translation for what I imagine when I hear Vuong's voice. And of course the throat is where poetry projects in the body, a lump the voice box as we navigate the enormity of words we want to say or those we choose to read and resonate with. 

But after leaving our vocal chords, I'd have to propose that perhaps poetry resides in the lungs. Filling our bodies, our blood, our bellies with the in and exhales of deep deep feeling. Beauty and brutality reverberating through our ribcage, releasing, or as you say uncaging, the heart. 

I'm off to read now. Page 48. 

A xx

…

Annika,

I was so inspired by the extract you shared from Night Sky with Exit Wounds. This idea of ‘two moons in the lake’. It feels like a very moving metaphor—especially today, on the night of the full moon—and one that sings through the body.

Tonight, I am revisiting one of my favourite poems in this collection, ‘Eurydice’ and it, too, recalls the moon.

We saw it coming

but kept walking through the hole

in the garden. Because the leaves 

were pure green & the fire

only a pink brushstroke

in the distance. It’s not

about the light – but how dark

it makes you depending 

on where you stand.

Depending on where you stand

your name can sound like a full moon

I hear these words as if tuning into a piece of music. Can feel them, too, radiating out from my chest cavity—where one might expect to find ‘the rib’s hollowed hum’ and where I sense the light now, as it dances forth to meet the black of night.

x R

…

Rosie, 

Oh, the last line you shared from ‘Eurydice’—your name can sound like a full moon—is such a beautiful visual, and I especially love this idea of light and dark working as versions of the same truth. The difference in perspective (or location) becomes instead the marker of one's reality. 

This is what I love so deeply about Vuong’s writing, the subtle shifts to the ways in which we would always or otherwise view and speak about things. How his words slice through the soul, wrapping up things of such brutality in light and beauty and honesty.

And so I suppose truth really is the light then and the way in which we see or feel it depends on how close we are from darkness. 

Page 35 is where I’m landing tonight, ‘Into the Breach’

gently. Tenderness 

a thing to be beaten 

into. Fireflies stung

through sapphire air. 

…

The way light

keep its shadows 

by swallowing it.   

A xx

…

Dearest Reader,

We hope that this exchange will help inspire you to pick up a copy of Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds. And, in it, discover the unique poetry of the uncaged heart—as it dances free within our bodies. 

x JANE