A review by ranwans
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

3.0

Ode to masturbation and Prayer for the Newly Damned were my favorite. I can tell a lot of these poems are clearly personal regarding Vuong's life, but as a reader, especially in part 1, I found myself lost and dissecting the meanings of his poems. The context of a majority of his poems were vague, leaving me feeling like a lot of the lines could mean anything, which would be fine if it were a fiction-based poetry book, but even now finishing Night Sky with Exit wounds, I still feel like I truly don't understand what I read and not because I don't have a deep understanding of poetry literary devices, but because a lot of his writing felt overly poetic to the point where most lines don't tell a story, but rather tried to make itself look pretty for the sake of poetry. Overall, I'd give this a 3.5