"Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? The comma forced to be a period?"
The author, Ocean Vuong is undeniably a poet. Every sentence, every word he wrote dances joyously and meaningfully like a shadow of a flame on the wall. I mean I'm trying hard to catch up with him here but can I? To say that the writing in this book is gorgeous would be an understatement.
This is my third book of February, I'm exceeding myself. Still, every book I chose this month is amazing in its own very way. Vuong shoots his words, images, and concepts through his prismatic, gravitic artistry, resulting in a spreading rainbow that bends in multiple directions. It's a literal and poetic trip from the rural area of Vietnam during the war to the street of Hartford in the middle of the night. Everything emerges so vividly, so brutally yet so beautifully.
Sometimes when I read the book, I had to stop to let everything sink in, absorb the meaning Vuong wants to transmit. The book does not follow a typical story-telling, it's a combination of many elements. Despite its diminutive size, this is neither light nor an easy read. You don't have to be a poet or a poetry aficionado to appreciate the beauty of this book because the book can touch you on more levels than you realize. The stories Ocean Vuong delivers are simple and easy to follow, although there are some graphic scenes that are bold and may be controversial to many that make my face a little red when I read it. But beyond that, I was jealous of how can someone writes so raw yet so honest.
I truly enjoy staring at a sentence and mentally rereading it until it becomes ingrained in my mind. I want to be moved, awed, and drawn in by gorgeous words that pierce the heart, and then I want to be healed of their bruising impact by deepening my comprehension and study of their meaning and purpose.
You know what, the best way for you to understand how I feel is for you to read the book. Because I don't have enough words to describe the beauty and the awe On Earth left inside of me. We may or may not be gorgeous briefly, but this book is and will always be a work of unparalleled beauty.
These quotes below are my favourites picking up from the book:
"They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it."
"I miss you more than I remember you.”
"You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
"Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it."
“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.”
“To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
“But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.”
“I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted.”
“No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.”
“I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?”
“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.”
“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.”
“Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
“When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote begin with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere. Even when I know something to be true I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real.”
“Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of.”
And more.
Comments