Reading list update -17

Three books since the last review. One of evocative poetry and two quick-read novels. Here is my updated reading list and the previous reading update. Now for the 13-point review:

1. Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong gets a 3.9 on 5. This is the poet’s first full length collection that has 35 intensely personal poems.
2. There is, first of all, the language: dagger sharp and lily soft all at once. The images are vivid, exaggerated by the clever crafting, the short lines veering across the page like an urgency in morse begging to be translated. As in this: “Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?” – On earth we’re briefly gorgeous or “What becomes of the shepherd / when the sheep are cannibals” – Prayer for the newly damned.
3. How much of confessional/ autobiographical poetry needs to tell cohesive stories? How much can be just outpouring that is still bearable to the poet, some things still not transmuting into words? There are poems about his father and mother, about Vietnam, all told in deliberate visuals, yet the reader, who only has the words turning richly in his mouth, is left wondering. And perhaps, that is enough. “…the colt .45— silent & heavy / as an amputated hand..” – Always and Forever. “You move through me like rain / heard/ from another country.” – To my father/ to my future son.
4. Then there are poems about love and lust and coming of age, perhaps. As if all life is visceral even at its most tender. “O minute hand, teach me / how to hold a man the way thirst/ holds water…” – A little closer to the edge.
5. And then of course is the end that is possibly the beginning of the narrative, the whole narrative. The look within: “Ocean, don’t be afraid. / The end of the road is so far ahead/ it is already behind us.” – Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong and “& so what— if my feathers / are burning. I / never asked for flight” – Devotion. These are the last two poems. As if the book is waiting for its sequel. Not to tell the reader more. But to tell the poet just a little bit more.
6. This is not a quick read because you will keep going back to read some poems. You can fill your senses with lines like “The way a field turns / its secrets / into peonies.” – Into the breach or “How / does anyone stop / regret / without cutting / off his hands?” – Seventh Circle of Earth or “I enter / my life / the way words / entered me— / by falling / through / the silence / of this wide / open mouth”. – Logophobia. You always leave the page wondering if it is about the past or the future, about beauty or violence, about a person or a people, and if the one is actually possible without the other.
7. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura gets a 3 on 5.
8. I picked this book because of the blurb and because the story was set in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but except for the few scenes from the trial, the book had a lot of tropes, characters that didn’t develop or had no real purpose and an ending that fell entirely flat.
9. The language is light and crisp but the story doesn’t hold your attention and you end up not caring about any of the characters at all, especially the protagonist. It is curious that the undertrial evil ex-president is the only one who draws any interest. Or maybe that was the intent. The parts about how interpretation works and the role and emotions of the interpreter are of value. We are, in the end, what we say and how, more importantly, we are understood.
10. This city is empty by Rovshan Abdullaoglu gets 3.5/5, though it does feel like the book may read much better in the original Azerbaijani. This is a novel with a simple premise: an unlikely friendship between two people that shows how sometimes all it takes is one person to see you for who you are, to hear you and be on your side, for all your wounds to heal. “Perhaps the person next to us is just like us and is thinking that there is no one near him”.
11. Willie, carrying the baggage of a dysfunctional childhood, the loss of a dream and the burden of estrangement from his family, meets the younger, ailing, Wisam in a cancer hospital and learns how to move on and find happiness. “Willie, you need only ten seconds to feel happy.” Wisam’s story is equally complicated but he faces his mortality bravely, having realized the value of life. “How much strength does it take to know that you are alone… how much strength does it take to keep people from guessing that you cry at night all alone…”
12. “Some people take a journey of one hundred years in a single day.”
13. “A mother does not have to be taught to cry when her child dies. When the time comes, life itself is the teacher.”