Night Sky With Exit Wounds

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 enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hunger.

"Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."  -  LitHub 

"Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. 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."  -  The New Yorker

"Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with... This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."  -  Buzzfeed's Most Exciting New Books of 2016

“In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into - and culls from - individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the Collection."  -  Publishers Weekly