Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016>
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016

There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.-New York Times

From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.--New Yorker

Extraordinary.--Los Angeles Times

Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival.--Boston Globe

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial big--and very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant.

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night--sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side--
Waiting.

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016>
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016

There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.-New York Times

From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.--New Yorker

Extraordinary.--Los Angeles Times

Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival.--Boston Globe

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial big--and very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant.

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night--sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side--
Waiting.

Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College after being born in Saigon, Vietnam. He has two chapbooks and a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, to his credit. Ocean Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and 2016 Whiting Prize winner, lives in New York City.