Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Product Description WINNER of the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizeA New York Times Top 10 Book 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."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Library Journal 2016 Best Books of the Year WINNER, 2016 Whiting AwardWINNER, 2017 Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn AwardFINALIST, 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery AwardFINALIST, 2017 Lambda Literary Award In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these poems seek a myriad existence without forgetting the prerequisite of self-preservation in a world bent on extinguishing its othered voices. Vuong's poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers. Praise for Ocean Vuong:"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 "[A] masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence." --Buzzfeed Books "An important new voice in American poetry."--Beloit Poetry Journal "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 "[Vuong] takes from Pound the ability to eternalize a moment." --POETRY "Even as Vuong leads you through every pleasure a body deserves and all the ensuing grief, these poems restore you with hope, that godforsaken thing--alive, singing along to the radio, suddenly sufficient."--Traci Brimhall "What this poet sees on the street, in a blizzard, or even while studying an apple reminds me of those dreams we have in common: dreams in which we are falling but never touch the ground, dreams in which we are naked in the presence of men suited for our ruin."--Jericho Brown Review WINNER of the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizeWINNER of a 2016 Whiting AwardThe New York Times Top 10 Books of 2016Featured on NPR's "All Things Considered"Featured on PBS NewsHourBoston Globe Best Books of Year Huffington Post's 12 Great Poetry Books to Read 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