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 Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Nation, New Republic, 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.
*Observer, Books of the Year*
Vuong writes with a piercing, dreamlike clarity.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*Sunday Times*
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