Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizeWinner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First CollectionA Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the YearPBS Summer Recommendation'Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move- he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.' New YorkerWinner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize'Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move- he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.' New YorkerAn extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.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.'These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.' Andrew McMillanWinner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First CollectionA Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the YearPBS Summer Recommendation

Winner of Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 2017 (UK) Winner of T S Eliot Prize 2018 (UK)

“Night Sky With Exit Wounds ...startled me with its urgency and its relevance. A eerily sure-footed debut.”

Night Sky With Exit Wounds…startled me with its urgency and its relevance. A eerily sure-footed debut. -- Rupert Thomson Observer, Books of the Year
Vuong writes with a piercing, dreamlike clarity. -- Tristram Fane Saunders Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
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. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion. New Yorker
Ocean Vuong is one of my auto-buy authors. I keep recommending his Night Sky With Exit Wounds to everyone; I can’t shout loud enough about it… I have quite a complicated relationship with what’s considered "classical poetry" but then someone like Ocean Vuong comes along, and he’s doing something so exciting that you can’t help but get caught up in it. -- Sara Collins Refinery29
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. -- Kate Kellaway Observer
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. -- Michiko Kakutani New York Times
Ocean Vuong is the Walt Whitman of Vietnamese American literature. Lyrical, expansive, sexual, provocative, he sings of the Vietnamese body and of Vietnamese history. -- Viet Thanh Nguyen Literary Hub
The operatic voice of the book is vulnerable and unpredictable. 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. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod The Sunday Times
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. -- David Wheatley Literary Review
Vuong writes in what may be one of the most unfashionable modes of recent decades, in the richly meditative style of Rainer Maria Rilke. And, almost unbelievably, he does so successfully… Vuong’s roomy, cool, risky poems are more than promising, and this is an exciting and compelling book. -- John McAuliffe Irish Times

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, and the New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.