decodethebooks's reviews
1135 reviews

With all the love and respect in the world... huh?

"Forgive me, Lord: I've died so little.
- César Vallejo"

from Dear Peter
- "childhood is only a cage that widens"
- "I'm back inside
my head
where it's safe"

from Beautiful Short Loser
- "Oh no. The sadness is intensifying. How rude."
- "Inside my head, the war is everywhere."
- Because what I did with my one short beautiful life -
was lose it
one a winning streak."

from You Guys
- "are
you listening I'm sorry
for being useful only
in language are you still
with me."

from The Last Dinosaur
- "Didn't know my eyes had three
shades of white but only one image
of my mother."

from The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica
- "I want to
take care of our planet
because I need a beautful
graveyard."

from Dear T
- "but we deserve more than this you said this"
- "maybe I can build a boy
out of the silences inside maybe
we can cease without dying fuck
without tears falling"

from Waterline
- "let me enter
this nearly-gone yes
the way death enters
anything- fully
& without a trace."

from Not Even
-"I promise, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air- and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm."
- "Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed American letters, turns to gold.
Our sorrows Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.
Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it.
I'm trying to be real but it costs too much."

from Nothing
- "But ghosts say funny things when they're family."
- "Something must come of this."

from Künstlerroman
- "We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy."

from Reasons for Staying
- "Because this miss I made I made with love."
- "Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured."
- "Because crying, believe me it or not, did wonders."
- "Because my uncle never killed himself - but simply died on purpose."
- "Because I stopped apologising into visibility."
- "Because this body is my last address."

from Ars Poetica as the Maker
- "I would go
too far. Because I, too,
needed a place
to hold me."

from Tell Me Something Good
- "You are something made, then made
to survive - which means you are somebody's son."
- "You can be nothing
& still breathing. Believe me."

from No One Knows the Way to Heaven
- "I am wrong often - but not enough
to forget you."
- "There's enough
for you, but not enough
for you."

from Almost Human
- "But too late. I red. I made a killing
in language & was surrounded
by ghosts."

from Dear Rose
- I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying."
- "I was born
because you were starving."
- "they shot
my brother you said looking down
but away from the dead
eyes my little brother
if reading is to live
in two/worlds at once why
is he not here."

from Woodworking at the End of the World
- "Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life
the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.
& I was free."



favourite poems
- Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker
- Nothing
- Reasons for Staying

Would I recommend this book??
I recommend Ocean Vuong's other works rather than this one. I loved On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous!! Read that not this.

Will I re-read this book?
No. I doubt I'll think about every again.