Night Sky with Exit Wounds
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4.5 • 50 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, 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. 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." There are times when Vuong's intense sincerity edges too far toward sentimentality: "Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn./ Say autumn despite the green/ in your eyes." Yet these moments feel difficult to avoid in a book whose speakers risk so much raw emotion: "7:18am. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message. Couldn't listen/ to all of it. That makes three this year." By juxtaposing startling observations with more common images, Vuong forges poems that feel familiar, yet honest and original.
