One of the most important debut collections for a generation. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T.S. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2014, and American Poetry Review, which awarded. The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and a 2014 Pushcart Prize. 'These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press. Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects - love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire - and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention- '.the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.' This is an unusual, important book- both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years. 'Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move- he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.' New YorkerĪn extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. The eye staring back from the other side waiting. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. So you take the knife to the wall instead. Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First CollectionĪ Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf.

Night sky with exit wounds best poems