Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize
Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
PBS Summer Recommendation
'Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move- he manages the varied
currents of English with muscled intuition.' New Yorker
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 The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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 *
Taking war and cultural upheaval in its stride, Night Sky with
Exit Wounds is an assured but open debut collection.
It's accessible to non-poetry readers while offering sufficient
depth to keep the experts engaged. -- Aimee Grant Cumberbatch *
Evening Standard *
If you only read one new book of poetry this year, make it Ocean
Vuong's game-changing debut collection. Night Sky With Exit
Wounds is breathtakingly beautiful, gut-wrenching and
sublime... Phenomenal. * Attitude *
One of the most extraordinary first collections of poems in
recent memory... The poems sear through the heart, Vuong
finding the words and feelings to capture moments with complete
clarity. -- Alex Scott * Cent *
His style is not unlike a wall of sounds, a relatively
consistent, arrestedly pubescent palette of desire and obsession,
turned up high enough to hit the pulse. -- Declan Ryan *
Times Literary Supplement *
From its opening lines...the book brims with precise, surreal,
erotic imagery... Vuong authoritatively lays claim to a range
of symbols and tropes... Vuong possesses a large and unusual
imagination... Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a remarkable debut.
Where Vuong is headed is anyone's guess, but you'll want to go with
him. -- Paul Batchelor * New Statesman *
Vuong's intimate lyrical voice, his precise, stark imagery and
engagement with gay sexuality construct a familiar story of
loss... Balancing memory and silence with erudition, Vuong's
poetry resists being so easily pinned down... Vuong's poems,
written with intelligence and tenderness, offer new spaces for
becoming. -- Sandeep Parmar * Guardian *
His debut collection, praised for its "precise, stark" imagery, can
be read both as a personal story - of gay sexuality, absent fathers
and hyphenated identities - and as a highly erudite exploration
of poetry's possibilities. -- Martin Doyle * Irish Times *
His debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is the
work of a man with history on his back, even if he has had to
imagine some of it into being again. He brings a mythmaker's
insistence on being seen and heard to subjects ranging from the
death of Telemachus's father, from Homeric myth, to the fall of
Saigon and common-or-garden masturbation. -- Claire Armistead *
Guardian *
Vuong's words writhe and spin - his use of English is
astonishing. He's a smelter at his poetry, making words
transform into something other than letters and meaning.... His
gay love poems are stark, beautiful and utterly unnerving in
their uncompromising adoration... A magical journey into
Vuong's imagination and talents and an astonishing debut
collection. * Gscene *
Night Sky With Exit Wounds...contains poems of finely
pitched, operatic feeling that unpick the violence and fragility of
masculinity with wisdom and humour. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * Sunday
Times *
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