Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

If Ocean Vuong continues to write for another fifty years, I can almost guarantee he will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Prior to Night Sky With Exit Wounds, as far as I can tell, Vuong had only published a few chapbooks. So, to have this as your debut collection is pretty astounding (and his follow-up novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, bearing the same title as one of the poems in this collection, only served to skyrocket him into the literary limelight).

The collection as a whole deals with issues of family, immigration, death, loss, grief, and sexuality. The opening poem in the collection is an astounding start. “Threshold” is a rich set of off-set couplets. The speaker of the poem is on his knees looking through the keyhole at a man showering “but the rain // falling through him: guitar strings snapping / over his globe shoulders” (3). The man sings and Vuong writes, “His voice — / it filled me to the core / like a skeleton” (3), an image that I really like. There’s a sort of parallel of near-spectral bodies and the nearly religious imagery of the piece serves as a kind of opening prayer for the collection.

Another early standout for me was the poem “Trojan.” The opening line has a metaphysical quality and also takes a turn with a clever line break: “A finger’s worth of dark from daybreak, he steps / into a red dress” (9). It continues, “A flame caught / in a mirror the width of a coffin” (9). The juxtaposition of ideas is a welcome surprise, unexpected. In another moment, there’s a visceral image of decay that has just a hint of horror: “The bruise-blue wallpaper peeling / into hooks as he twirls” (9). The metaphor of the main character being a Trojan horse is crafted wonderfully with a blend of the elegant and the violent. For instance, “He moves like any / other fracture, revealing the briefest doors” (9). Further “The dress / petaling off him like the skin / of an apple. As if their swords / aren’t sharpening / inside him. This horse with its human / face” (9).

Vuong rides a challenging line very effectively. Some poets shine through their pithy one-liners. Some poets shine in the big picture, details be damned. There’s no shortage of beautiful standout lines, but the conceptual and thematic frameworks of the book give it a wonderful cohesiveness that never feels too repetitive. For an example of a standout line, in “Aubade with Burning City,” Vuong writes “Snow scraping against the window. / Snow shredded / with gunfire” (11). It’s that surprise violence that penetrates serene images that Vuong conducts so masterfully.

I’d follow that up by commenting on the poem “Always & Forever.” It maintains the sense of surprise that makes so much of his work work. The poem opens with the following lines: “Open this when you need me most, / he said, as he slid the shoe box, wrapped // in duct tape, beneath my bed” (17). I suspected the poem was about some kind of emergency self-care box or a letter of support to help get through the hardest days. The poem goes on for about a half a page before revealing what’s in the box: “sunk in folds of yellowed news / -paper, lies the Colt .45—silent & heavy // as an amputated hand.” The heaviness of the implication hits hard. The suggestion that the gun is what he needs most has such a surprising and dark overcast to it and the narrator wonders “if an entry wound in the night // would make a hole wide as morning” (17). It’s a stunning turn and the poem ends just as strong: “The boy pretending / to be asleep as his father’s clutch tightens. // The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten / around a bullet // to make it speak” (18).

Something I find surprising and somewhat characteristic of Vuong’s work is that he often embodies the perspective of his mother. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he writes extended letters to his mother. This collection explores similar themes regarding sexuality and race. There’s even a moment about phantom pains that predates the unforgettable, perfect scene in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous of his mother massaging the empty space where a woman’s leg used to be. In “Headfirst,” Vuong seems to write as his mother to himself in aphoristic and allusive ways: “Don’t you know? / There are men who touch breasts / as they would / the tops of skulls. Men / who carry dreams / over mountains, the dead / on their backs” (20). She says, “Stupid boy. / You can get lost in every book / but you’ll never forget yourself / the way god forgets / his hands” (20). The final line serves as an aphoristic piece of advice for life: “My son, tell them / the body is a blade that sharpens / by cutting” (21). Again: darkness at the edge of beautiful phrasing and imagery.

In short, Night Sky With Exit Wounds has a lot to offer. Its language is rich. It offers great turns of phrase and thinking that are engaging and surprising. Vuong’s promise has already transformed into proof of his excellence, given how much attention his subsequent books have received. This early glimpse into his work already has a lot to offer and if Vuong continues to grow in his craft, we can only wait and see how many accolades he’s going to round up.

Happy reading!

Knot Body by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

        In the poem “ Portrait of a Body in Pause,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch says they keep “hitting command + F to make sure pain makes up less than 10% of [their] word count.” They then document 22 words that come up frequently throughout the collection that characterize their chronic pain. Knot Body is a little project that is part memoir, part essay, part poetry collection (often prose poetry) that establishes a clear focus that elevates its personal-focus above Instapoet contemporaries.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers a distinct perspective. Pulling from the bio at the end of the book, I’d note that they are a queer Arab poet living in unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. While the poems touch somewhat on being Arab, most of the focus is on being trans and living with the chronic pain of fibromyalgia (and also exposing some of the transphobic practices in diagnosis (apparently fibromyalgia is a woman’s disease). El Bechelany-Lynch writes in a conversational style, indeed sometimes with direct address to the audience. Many of the poems start with the line, “Dear friends, lover, and in-betweens” and proceed through an epistolary mode that lends it a personable quality (although the poet notes in one poem that they make a distinct attempt to ride the line of fictionalized autobiography.)

Many of the sections address what the pain is like, how it affects relationships with others, and how it interacts with other aspects of the poet’s identity. The collection is insightful and asks some challenging questions about how we interact with others who have chronic pain and invisible disabilities. The conversational style is sometimes peppered with more explicitly poetic passages, but what the collection does best is offer an account of personal experience. It’s a document in a life that can promote empathy, understanding, and connection. Allow it to expand your perspective.

Happy reading!

The Elements of Semiology by Roland Barthes

I am inching my way towards Roland Barthes completionism, and I was very kindly gifted The Elements of Semiology for Christmas. It’s a short, challenging volume about the way our linguistic frameworks operate. It is definitely one of the more opaque Barthes books I’ve read since it relies on some highly technical language and some significant background knowledge of Ferdinand de Saussure and other semiologists. There are a few key take-aways that I’ll try to keep short.

One of the things I found most helpful is Barthes regular itemization and categorization of concepts. The way I read it, Barthes offers an alternative to a sequential and linear kind of thinking that challenges the binarism at the core of Saussure. Barthes discusses the idea of “presence / absence” as a way of relating concepts, and offers the suggestion of either implying or not implying “i) the mental representation of the relata” or “an analogy between the relata”, or an immediate “link between the two relata (the stimulus and its response)” or that the relata “exactly coincide” or one overruns the other, or they imply “an existential connection with the user” (35-36). While the text could give some more concrete examples to help guide readers, it’s an interesting framework for how we classify the connections between things.

The Elements of Semiology relies on two core examples that emerge frequently: references to the Highway Code and, somewhat amusingly, the fashion industry. I say amusingly because it appears almost like a fixation and it also makes me think of the notion of the ‘seam’ that Barthes elaborates on in The Pleasure of the Text.

When discussing the semiological sign, Barthes goes beyond language. His philosophy opens up the world in that way: everything is open to interpretation. The world is composed of signs and signifiers. He gives the example of how the colour of a light tells us to drive forward or not in the Highway Code. Where linguistics and semiology differ is that semiological systems “have a substance of expression whose essence is not to signify” (41)---and yet they do. Barthes refers to “sign-functions” that come to take on meaning and, while they seem arbitrary, “as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself” (41). A helpful example is the idea of how someone might wear a raincoat for the practical purpose of not getting wet in the rain, but also implies a certain relationship to the situation. 

To me, that’s what is so revolutionary about Barthes from a literary standpoint. Interpretation is not just about the words on the page, but their context as well. He also addresses the idea that interpretation is not as simple as this-stands-for-that; signs have a meaning that is separate and distinct that exist on a separate plane. Barthes says that

the signified is neither [the mental representation], nor [the real thing], but rather [the utterable]; being neither an act of consciousness, nor a real thing, it can be defined only within the signifying process, in a quasi-tautological way: it is this ‘something’ which is meant by the person who uses the sign. In this way we are back again to a purely functional definition: the signified is one of the two relata of the sign; the only difference which opposes it to the signified is that the latter is a mediator. (43)

As you can likely tell, the language is quite complex. With a focus on the utterable, Barthes says that objects, images, and gestures “refer back to something which can only be expressed through them” (43) but that the “semiological signified can be taken up by the linguistic signs” (43). Barthes talks about sweater weather in that respect: “a certain sweater means long autumn walks in the woods; in this case, the signified is mediated not only by its vestimentary signifier (the sweater), but also by a fragment of speech” (43). Again: the context in which signs appear matters.

Barthes discusses the idea several times of trying to transfer the meaning of one field into another. For instance, if you think about music, the meaning is essentially felt and then is offered verbalized signifieds (e.g. “anguished, stormy, sombre, tormented, etc.”). They are all signs for a musical signified to something that, essentially, cannot face “verbal dissection and no metaphorical small change” (45). These descriptions are referred to as metalanguages.

There is some pretty challenging discussion of how different metalanguages can interact with one another and what determines whether they are closed or open systems. There’s the notion of syntagms, which are kind of like a collection of signifiers that are associated together in the same place. Conversely, “several lexicons—and consequently several bodies of signifieds—can coexist within the same individual, determine in each one more or less ‘deep’ readings” (47). That overlap, actually, makes me think about The Pleasure of the Text being the seam where things overlap and are about to come apart. Essentially, signification “does not unite unilateral entities, it does not conjoin two terms, for the very good reason that signifier and signified are both at once term and relation” (48). Barthes says that ambiguity is exactly what forms semiological discourse, even in its clumsiness (48).

At its core, Barthes is still addressing the idea of difference. Saussure suggests that all linguistics is a relationship of differences (this-not-that). Barthes does some interesting discussion of the way that oppositions can sometimes be identical and gives some examples of words in French that sound the same despite having different meanings about number or time frame (e.g. finit/finissent, mange/mangent) (79). Semiology, in Barthes’ account, seems to suggest that we can go beyond the binaries of either/or and move towards a more both/and/neither.

(Sort of) as promised, I’m keeping this review short to try to keep my time management and priorities in check (new year, new me). I have two more Barthes texts on my shelf and I will be periodically reading him to try to enrich an understanding of the world.

        Happy reading! lowercasepoet Signing out.

Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games by Robert J. Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado

  I’m going to try something new this year and keep my reviews a bit more brief. That’s going to be a challenge since Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games has such a rich offering of essays about many kinds of games and experiences. The essays address issues of race, class, disability, gender, sexuality, capitalism, militarism, mental health, grief, and so on. It’s a great range of topics, if skewing a little too positively towards the video game industry.

There is a ton to discuss, but I’ll try to give just a brief overview of the essays and highlight just a few of my favourite essays along the way, which evoked a sense of connection and shared nostalgia over games from the past and thoughtfulness towards issues in the present. 

Elissa Washuta, a Native author from the Cowlitz people of Washington State, writes about The Last Of Us in “I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving.” She offers an Indigenous reading of the ethics and apocalyptic framework of the game alongside a more personal narrative of her choice to be sterilized despite a long history of forced sterilization of Indigenous people in North America.

“This Kind of Animal” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah sings the praises of Disco Elysium as a literary masterpiece, compelling me to play deeper into that detective RPG game with over a million lines of dialogue. There’s again a personal touch of trying to figure out his troubled relationship with his deceased father.

Max Delsohn’s “Thinking like the Knight” contrasts the lesbian idealism he savoured in Undertale with the more calculated and complex maneuvering of Hollow Knight, where every choice matters and which has taught him how to maneuver the world without taking a hit.

Keith S. Wilson offers the essay “Mule Milk,” which is a strange and engaging collage of thoughts about race, the environment, the existence of mules, slavery, pigeons, and Final Fantasy VI. It was a compelling case for reading race into the pixelated nostalgia of Final Fantasy VI. The central character, Terra, from one of my favourite Final Fantasy games ever, is presented as Black-coded and Keith reading his race into non-Black characters problematizes the industry while finding a beautiful, if troubled, identification in popular media. It’s a deeply thoughtful and somewhat oblique piece, perfect for academics.

“Staying with the Trouble” by Octavia Bright is a narrativization of discovering (and cheating through the age-barrier quiz of) Leisure Suit Larry on her uncle’s computer. It’s a compelling read and it speaks to a special time of Sierra adventure games while also that temptation of the illicit. Ultimately, Bright turns to the profound loneliness of the hypersexed game and the rules imposed on masculinity, eventually contrasting the game with Stray. It was excellent and poignant.

“Narnia Made of Pixels” by Charlie Jane Anders offers an overview of portal-fantasy films with a video game focus with some commentary on the way that game films reproduce capitalist logics of ownership of the system. It also touches on the possibilities for trans experience in such gaming worlds.

Jamil Jan Kochai’s essay “Cathartic Warfare” is an excellent reflection of being brown and seeing the slaughter of Afghan insurgents in Call of Duty. The essay is an excellent reflection of the militarism of games told from the perspective of someone who is depicted as the enemy and compelled to kill himself via the American army. I’ll be giving this one to my students for sure.

“The Cocoon” by Ander Monson is a thorough catalogue of all the Alien and Predator (and Alien Vs. Predator) games. The essay reads as a little excessive, offering full bullet points for all fifty (or more) games in the franchise but then leads to a discussion of connection with others. 

“Video Game Boss” is a brief autobiographical comic where Marinaomi depicts the misogyny of the game industry and weighing the pros and cons of leaving and the sense of responsibility towards women in general.

There’s a fascinating essay about white supremacy and the resurgence of Viking-based media, from Assassin’s Creed to Dragon Age: Inquisition, offered by Vanessa Villarreal’s “In the Shadow of the Wolf.” It’s challenging to summarize but it’s a very good grappling with how white supremacy draws on false histories of Vikings.

If you’re more interested in capitalism and the time-and-money-suck of mobile games, Tony Tulathimutte’s essay on Clash of Clans, “Clash Rules Everything Around Me.” It’s another excellent meditation on the value of time and consideration of what counts as a waste of time and waste of money. It’s an excellent discussion piece that I will also be giving my students.

“The Great Indoorsmen” by Eleanor Henderson is a touchingly personal essay about trying to buy a Playstation 5 for her sons and what gaming together means for connection, particularly with reference to teaching each other secrets in Super Mario Bros. There’s also a moment about “cheating” when creating a save state (rather than having to start all over), which I think would be a great concept to explore further.

“I Was a Transgender Supersoldier” by Nat Steele is a fascinating re-reading of Halo as a trans narrative. There’s also a great shout-out to Word Rescue for MS-DOS, and I loved that little slice of nostalgia. The narrative is compelling—what does it mean to embody a faceless character? I think this is another one that could enrich my students.

“Ninjas and Foxes” by Alexander Chee is an interesting reflection on Ninja Gaiden Black and Jade Empire, considering depictions of Asian culture. He comments on the way that Japanese made games depict Asian characters as more Western and problematizes that there seems to be more authentic Asian representation (Chinese, Indian, Japanese, etc.) in a Western-produced game and what it means for his personal identity.

“No Traces” by Stephen Sexton is about identification with a character when playing games alongside someone else. He talks about how he and his friend played Metal Gear Solid together and how key moments took place where he didn’t know whether he was playing or whether his friend was playing and how in some ways it does not matter. There’s also a narrative about his friend’s secret connection to the IRA and it felt cohesive.

“Status Effect” by Larissa Pham, at its core, is about being able to measure our pain. Referring to Genshin Impact as its core text, Pham thinks about buffs, debuffs, and status effects in RPG games. It’s an attempt to reconsider depression as a status effect that is measurable and can be remedied and managed.

“Ruined Ground” by J. Robert Lennon is an essay about Fallout 76, the pandemic, and familial connection. The most beautiful moment in the essay, though, almost crushing in its beauty and sorrow, is when the author is playing online and most people have their mics off. One couple is playing and accidentally left their mics on and Lennon reproduces the conversation they had; they were both sick and they were trying to figure out how to not go to work, but having to go to work. It is so powerfully human and so sad, especially in the context of the pandemic. 

The final essay in the collection, “We’re More Ghosts Than People” by Hanif Abdurraqib, is a complete knockout of an essay. It is part religious reflection, part grappling with grief, part about choices. It’s an essay about Red Dead Redemption 2 and consideration of the morality of the game. The central conceit of the essay is that while the author does not necessarily believe in heaven, he still has to believe in heaven for others and to try to help others. I identified a lot with the author’s desire to do good—I hate when games force me into ethically questionable positions. As an aside, in Grand Theft Auto 5, also produced by Rockstar Games, you are asked to kidnap an actor and then leave him in the way of a train to be killed to death, or you can let him out when he pleads for his life. I wanted to let him out, but you only get a “Trophy” for killing him. I find such moments really troubling. Abdurraqib’s essay ends with him, and Arthur Morgan of Read Dead Redemption 2, watching digital sunsets before either of them dies, refusing to finish the game a second time. It’s absolutely stunning and the perfect ending for the collection:

In my own orbits, in the center of trying to wrestle with my own goodness or badness was another option: complete stillness. I was most stagnant in my youth when I was trying to prevent myself from pursuing my lesser angels. My self-control is only a little better now, and so I do welcome the idling world, no matter how it comes and no matter how it might end up going. I find a type of salvation in holding patterns. Not one heaven, but many small, disparate ones. I sit on my couch for an hour without moving, and make a man sit at the edge of a cliff without moving, both of us watching a fake sky drown in color, both of us not yet sure when we’re going to die or how much time we have left. There are probably better ways to attempt the playing of God, but there are certainly far worse. (220)

Already, my ambitions to be more brief in my reviews have been thwarted. Hopefully the overview of the book entices you to read more. There were so many moving moments in the text, so much nostalgia and longing, so much hope and opportunity. It’s a profoundly human work for profoundly digital people.

Time to hit reset. Time to start again.