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Night Sky with Exit Wounds Kindle Edition
Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award
One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2016"
One of Lit Hub's "10 must-read poetry collections for April"
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
"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, identityall with a tremendous humanity."Slate
In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty intoand culls fromindividual, 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.’”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 nightsealed
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCopper Canyon Press
- Publication dateMay 23, 2016
- File size1105 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Publishers Weekly 2016 Poetry Top 10Irish Times 2016 Favourite Books of the Year Library Journal 2016 Best Books of the Year Buzzfeed Most Exciting Books of 2016Bustle Best Poetry Collections of 2016
"[A] masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence." --BuzzFeed Books
"The poems in Mr. Vuong's new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, possess[es] a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of 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."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"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."--The New Yorker
"Extraordinary." --Los Angeles Times
"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."--Boston Globe
"...[T]errifying, heartbreaking, surreal, and lyrical-I'm not quite sure how a poet can fit so much humanity into so few words. Ocean Vuong creates and poses alternate universes within these poems. He stands at the feet of American poetry and unties the masters' shoelaces. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a must read and re-read, a book that will be cherished." --Lambda Literary Review
"[A] haunting and fearless debut." --Publishers Weekly
"This book, with all of its fears, is probably what you've been hoping for."--Kenyon Review
"This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level." --2016 Whiting Award citation
"In Vuong's "Night Sky," the entry and exit wounds are real, torn open by gunshot and "misfired" words, but his poems insist we can be made whole by rapture."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Vuong's major contribution in Night Sky With Exit Wounds is to push back against the inclination to let fear define the exile's life." --LA Review of Books
'[O]ne reason Vuong's debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds feels so exquisite, so necessary, is that he offers another way to hold the present moment.' --Georgia Review
"Vuong's powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity--all with a tremendous humanity." --Slate
"[A] debut that will cement Vuong's status as one of the most important new poets writing today." --Rain Taxi
"Vuong's pitch-perfect approach, through the legacy of war and forced displacement, shows us why we can't afford to let him remember them alone."--The London Magazine
"At a time when poets are resigned to making boredom a commodity, [Vuong] reminds us that the limits of intimacy are an exhilarating frontier, and that the most urgent communications begin with the overture of letting down one's defenses."--The Rumpus
"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
"Occasionally there is a book so exquisitely realized that a reviewer wants simply to point to it and say "read this." Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is such a book."--BODY Literature
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B01EEQ8XI6
- Publisher : Copper Canyon Press (May 23, 2016)
- Publication date : May 23, 2016
- Language : English
- File size : 1105 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 98 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #169,383 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Asian-American Poetry
- #9 in LGBTQ+ Poetry (Kindle Store)
- #36 in Asian American Poetry
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 12 other languages worldwide. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.
Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst.
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"When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart
there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above..."
"Depending on where you stand
your name can sound like a full moon
shredded in a dead doe's pelt.
Your name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. Why did we
keep saying Yes–
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real..."
Get this collection! You won't get closer to a heartbeat than this!
He created a past life. Part of that creation became "Night Sky with Exit Wounds," which won the 2016 Whiting Award and has now won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize.
The collection is comprised of some 35 poems. Several of the poems are directly about his father, and Vuong imagines different reasons (and realities) for not knowing him. His father was imprisoned. His father is shot and dumped in the ocean, his body washing up on a beach. His father drowns in Newport Beach, California. His father is caught up in what happened in Vietnam. His father is an American soldier. The family is sailing on a refugee boat, fleeing a burning city. Vuong creates these different realities to fill a void, a painful void, one that leaves the poet experiencing his own "exit wounds."
The poet also imagines what might be his own creation.
A Little Closer to the Edge
Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand in hand,
into the bomb crater. The night full
of black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks
from shattering against her cheek, now dims
like a miniature moon behind her hair.
In this version, the snake is headless-stilled
like a cord unraveled from the lovers' ankles.
He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing
another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables
inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press
into her-as the field shreds itself
with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home
out of hip bones. O mother,
O minute hand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.
The poem is filled with the kinds of sharp and vivid images and metaphors found throughout the collection - the faux Rolex watch dimming like a miniature moon, a home made of hip bones, a night full of black teeth, a headless snake, a field shredding itself with cricket cries. Vuong creates jarring, often disquieting, abrupt and unexpected pictures, almost forcing us to acknowledge a truth in these self-created realties.
Vuong, in addition to the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, has received a number of other honors and recognitions - a Ruth Lilly Fellow; a Pushcart Prize; and honors from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and others. He received the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets from the American Poetry Review. His poems have been published in numerous literary and poetry journals, and he is the author of Burnings (2010). He is an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The poems of "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" are often graphic; several of the poems are about sex. Many of the poems imply that the absent father has led the poet on his own search for his fundamental identity. Tinged at times with anger, sadness, and yearning, it is a stunning, haunting collection.