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Chargement... Burningspar Ocean Vuong
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. "....I was born because someone was starving..." Knocked the breath out of my lungs. ( ) It's no secret I stalk Ocean Vuong. It's because I envy him: demographically, he's like me: he's my age (born in 1988), he's Vietnamese, he's queer, yet he's so talented the words "mind orgasm" is the first thought I have after reading his stuff. I don't write poetry anymore (editors told me to quit it), but I wrote one for/about him: "To A Beautiful Poet" You are the poet that takes my spots in literary magazines and I want to kill you and your beautiful language because I chose the wrong major and never learned how to write, or else how to read Whitman, who I read only once because I felt sorry for the guy, you know, for being dead, but then I figured I would've wanted him gone anyway. So now there's the problem of you. Now compare this anyone of the poems collected in Vuong's debut chapbook, Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press) and you would be jealous too. Collected here are 25 of Vuong's poems, some of which have already been published in literary journals such as Cha, PANK, and Ganymeade. Yet to assume this is just collected poetry is wrong. What Vuong has put together is a chapbook with coherent themes and imagery which, when read together, works to inform one another, adding up to a greater whole. In part, Vuong's collection is about the convergence of different spheres and the conflict and excitement that results in such clashes of country, memory, history, and bodies. The first poem, "Ars Poetica," a preface to the book, hints to this convergence: "When two ships emerge from a wall of fog, the sails lit with sheets of fire, there will be a traveler on each deck with the same face, watching flames reflect in the other's eyes" As the book continues, the image of flames and burning is further explored as a metaphor for both pain and pleasure. In Vuong's poetry, the flames of memory are painful ("Let us burn quietly into the lives/we never were") and inextinguishable ("My grandmother kisses as if history never ended, as if somewhere/a body is still/falling apart."). Vuong (and his narrators) is at once a subject of history as well as a witness to it. He not only feels the burnings, he sees it (as in "Kissing in Vietnamese," "My Mother Remembers Her Mother," and "The Photo"). But to say that all burnings are bad is not Vuong's point. There's pleasure too. Mostly these deal with the pleasures of human heat (in "More Than Sex") or imprints of it (in "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome"). Yet unlike those pain, experiences of pleasure are fleeting or used as moments rather than historic situations: "Even now, as the body trembles/from pleasure of its making/somewhere, a plane is pregnant with death." Vuong's poetic world is a world of pain: the pain of lives interrupted (in "Burnings"), the pain of never being able to come back ("Returning to the City of My Birth"), the pain of pleasure that cannot possibly last. But reading these poems--these wise, sometimes sad, sometimes sensual poems--one can see that pain can perhaps be the most beautiful thing of the human experience: not in a masochistic way, but because it's universal, something that one must acquire to be recognizably human: there simply is no other option. This is perhaps best articulated in the last poem "Seeing It As It Is," a bittersweet moment where a blind girl gains her eyesight and sees a burning building: "Mommy," she says, "you were right. This world/is beautiful." In Ocean Vuong's poetic vision, the world is beautiful with all its tears and fires. Burnings is a major yet compact achievement in this poet's career. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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Poetry. Asian American Studies. LGBT Studies. The poems of BURNINGS explore refugee culture, be the speaker a literal refugee from a torn homeland, or a refugee from his own skin, burning with the heat of awakening eroticism. In this world, we're all refugees from something. As two-time National Slam Champion Roger Bonair-Agard says: "Ocean manages to imbue the desperation of his being alive—with a savage beauty. It is not just that Ocean can render pain as a kind of loveliness, but that his poetic line will not let you forget the hurt or the garish brilliance of your triumph; will not let you look away. These poems shatter us detail by detail because Ocean leaves nothing unturned, because every lived thing in his poems demands to be fed by you; to nourish you in turn. You will not leave these poems dissatisfied. They will fill you utterly." Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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