Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Softcover

Vuong, Ocean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155659495X ISBN 13: 9781556594953

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2016

Synopsis

One of the most celebrated poetry books of the year:

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
NPR, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: "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 (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) 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."

"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

"The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible.... Highly recommended."--Library Journal, starred review

"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"

"This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world."--2016 Whiting Award citation

"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

"Vuong's powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity--all with a tremendous humanity."--Slate

"In his impressive debut collection, Vuong 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."--Publishers Weekly

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than

a portion of night--sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke

& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful

& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve

until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,

on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side--

waiting.

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 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.

About this title

Review:

"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)

"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)

Book Description:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 155659495X
• ISBN 13: 9781556594953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70