'The poetry is a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide. It's accessible to non-poetry readers while offering sufficient depth to keep the experts engaged.' -Aimee Grant Cumberbatch, The Evening Standard 'Taking war and cultural upheaval in its stride, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an assured but open debut collection. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.' -Andrew McMillan 'These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. You will always remember what you were doing

They say the sky is blueīut I know it’s black seen through too much distance. The TV said the planes have hit the buildings. Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952 From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.” His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant.

As the New Yorker recorded, “reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. The poems included talk not just of the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but of a world brimming with hope and wonder. Remarkably, Vuong was the first member of his family to gain literacy, arriving to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee as a 2-year-old child. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2017ĭescribed by Viet Thanh Nguyen as the “Walt Whitman of Vietnamese American literature”, Ocean Vuong’s debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a profound investigation of the refugee experience and three generations of conflict in a land annihilated by the forces of war.

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