Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Vuong, Ocean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911214519 ISBN 13: 9781911214519

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2017

Winner 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 Yorker

An 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 McMillan

Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
PBS Summer Recommendation

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)

"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)

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