Night Sky with Exit Wounds

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016 “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.”—New York Times “From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—New Yorker "Extraordinary."—Los Angeles Times "Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."—Boston Globe 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." 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. 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.’”-Publishers Weekly "What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is."-Li-Young Lee 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 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City, New York.