Night Sky with Exit Wounds Lesson Plan

Why do you think Vuong has chosen the form he has for "Seventh Circle of Earth"? What is surprising about it? What is its impact?

The entirety of "Seventh Circle of Earth" is footnotes—its "actual content" is blank. This unusual form shocks us with the absence of a speaker/of the speakers in the main "body" of the poem and seems to imply that the men have been burned out of their real lives, their experiences and desires now part of memory. In academic writing, footnotes may imply secondary, less relevant content, or they may be a place where sources are cited. Students should consider how they feel reading an empty poem with footnotes, and which form of footnotes Vuong might...