The poetry is a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide… I like the fragility, resilience and the sense that the stories that need telling are hardest to tell – a difficulty Ocean Vuong is courageously minded to overcome. Aimee Grant Cumberbatch, Evening Standard It’s accessible to non-poetry readers while offering sufficient depth to keep the experts engaged. Taking war and cultural upheaval in its stride, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an assured but open debut collection. Many of the poems in this, Vuong’s debut collection, achieve lift-off amid comparable scenes of drama and desperation… This is a book full of promise. Some of its strongest poems are also the strangest… It is an impressive, uneven, moving book about painful and important subjects – and is the work of a young poet who might, excitingly, say anything next. The operatic voice of the book is vulnerable and unpredictable. Lyrical, expansive, sexual, provocative, he sings of the Vietnamese body and of Vietnamese history. Ocean Vuong is the Walt Whitman of Vietnamese American literature. There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr Vuong’s sincerity and candour, and from his ability to capture specific moments in rime with photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion. Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition … His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant.

One of the most important debut collections for a generation.’ Andrew McMillan

‘These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years. ‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.’ New YorkerĪn extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First CollectionĪ Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

Night sky with exit wounds poems