Vuong’s father hovers like a dark and ominous figure over the bulk of the collection. It specifically deals with Vuong’s relationship with his father, and his coming to terms with his own sexuality at a young age.
The first poem of the collection, “Threshold,” speaks to generational trauma. He recalls many stories told to him by his grandmother, and they permeate his written works. Vuong was the first in his family to learn to read, but his poetry is reflective of the history of oral tradition that exists in Vietnamese culture. Vuong also notes the irony in the fact that his grandmother was married to an American serviceman, meaning that without the war, he and his family likely wouldn’t exist. It is no wonder that Vuong felt it necessary to refer to this day in history, as it marked the end of the war and the beginning of the reunification of Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The poem is a combination of this imagery and lines from Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” the song broadcast to the Armed Forces, signaling that the final evacuation was underway. For example, in “Aubade With Burning City,” Vuong writes with vivid imagery about the Fall of Saigon in 1975, many of these images borrowed from the memory of his grandmother who would have witnessed these events first-hand. Vuong’s poetic sensibility is a result of his own experiences, as well as events recounted to him by his family members. Vuong was only two years old at the time. Vuong’s upbringing plays a key role in the subject matter of the poems in this collection, often making references to the fact that he was born on a rice farm in 1988 and spent a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before his family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam. After publication, the collection received much critical acclaim and in 2017, the book won the prestigious T.S. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a 2016 collection of poetry by Vietnamese American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong.
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