Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

Overview

A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619321564
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/23/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	70
Sales rank:	351,242
File size:	707 KB

About the Author

Ocean Vuong: Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

…[Vuong] grew up listening to his grandmother's stories and folk songs, and his poetry takes the musicality of that oral tradition and weds it, brilliantly, with his love of the English language. The poems in Mr. Vuong's new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds…possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images…and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words. 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…Mr. Vuong writes as an immigrant and as a gay man, and his poems capture what it means to be an outsider…and the brutal history of prejudice in America…[Night Sky With Exit Wounds] beautifully attests to Mr. Vuong's…ability to use the magic of words to summon and preserve the past—to turn "bones to sonatas" and by pressing pen to paper, touch his family "back from extinction."

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

03/21/2016
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, as when he writes, “Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won’t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.” There are times when Vuong’s intense sincerity edges too far toward sentimentality: “Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn./ Say autumn despite the green/ in your eyes.” Yet these moments feel difficult to avoid in a book whose speakers risk so much raw emotion: “7:18am. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message. Couldn’t listen/ to all of it. That makes three this year.” By juxtaposing startling observations with more common images, Vuong forges poems that feel familiar, yet honest and original. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/15/2016
Vuong was named one of this year's Whiting Award recipients, and this debut collection (his chapbooks include Burnings, an American Library Association (ALA) Over the Rainbow selection) shows why. The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible. Born in Ho Chi Minh City in the late 1980s, Vuong can reignite scenes from his country's recent traumas; as Saigon falls, "Milkflower petals in the street/ like pieces of a girl's dress" drift over the dead and injured, and the city lies "so white it is ready for ink" ("White Christmas" really played on the airwaves at the time). Elsewhere, the pain and glory of young love and young life emerge ("Show me how ruin makes a home/ out of hip bones…// teach me to hold a man the way thirst// holds water"). VERDICT Highly recommended.

Library Journal