Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong Narrated by Keong Sim

Overview

WINNER of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize



A 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 Award WINNER, 2017 Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award FINALIST, 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award FINALIST, 2017 Lambda Literary Award FINALIST



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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…[Vuong] grew up listening to his grandmother's stories and folk songs, and his poetry takes the musicality of that oral tradition and weds it, brilliantly, with his love of the English language. The poems in Mr. Vuong's new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds…possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images…and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his 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…Mr. Vuong writes as an immigrant and as a gay man, and his poems capture what it means to be an outsider…and the brutal history of prejudice in America…[Night Sky With Exit Wounds] beautifully attests to Mr. Vuong's…ability to use the magic of words to summon and preserve the past—to turn "bones to sonatas" and by pressing pen to paper, touch his family "back from extinction."

From the Publisher

WINNER of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize
WINNER of a 2016 Whiting Award
The New York Times Top 10 Books of 2016
Featured on NPR's "All Things Considered"
Featured on PBS NewsHour
Boston Globe Best Books of Year 
Huffington Post's 12 Great Poetry Books to Read
Publishers Weekly 2016 Poetry Top 10
Irish Times 2016 Favourite Books of the Year 
Library Journal 2016 Best Books of the Year 
Buzzfeed Most Exciting Books of 2016
Bustle Best Poetry Collections of 2016

"[A] masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."—BuzzFeed Books

“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. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his 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, New York Times

“Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. 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

"Extraordinary."—Los Angeles Times

"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."—Boston Globe

"Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with. . . . This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."—Buzzfeed's "Most Exciting New Books of 2016"

"Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."—LitHub

"Vuong’s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity—all with a tremendous humanity."—Slate

“In his impressive debut collection, Vuong 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.”—Publishers Weekly

“The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelibly. . . . Highly recommended.”—Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

"This book, with all of its fears, is probably what you've been hoping for."—Kenyon Review

"In Vuong's ‘Night Sky,’ the entry and exit wounds are real, torn open by gunshot and ‘misfired’ words, but his poems insist we can be made whole by rapture."—San Francisco Chronicle

"This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level . . . a stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.”—2016 Whiting Award citation

"Vuong's major contribution in Night Sky With Exit Wounds is to push back against the inclination to let fear define the exile's life."—Los Angeles Review of Books

“[O]ne reason Vuong's debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds feels so exquisite, so necessary, is that he offers another way to hold the present moment.”—Georgia Review

"[A] debut that will cement Vuong's status as one of the most important new poets writing today."—Rain Taxi

"Vuong's pitch-perfect approach, through the legacy of war and forced displacement, shows us why we can't afford to let him remember them alone."—The London Magazine

"At a time when poets are resigned to making boredom a commodity, [Vuong] reminds us that the limits of intimacy are an exhilarating frontier, and that the most urgent communications begin with the overture of letting down one's defenses."—The Rumpus

"[T]errifying, heartbreaking, surreal, and lyrical—I'm not quite sure how a poet can fit so much humanity into so few words. Ocean Vuong creates and poses alternate universes within these poems. He stands at the feet of American poetry and unties the masters' shoelaces. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a must read and re-read, a book that will be cherished."—Lambda Literary Review

"Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."—LitHub

"Occasionally there is a book so exquisitely realized that a reviewer wants simply to point to it and say ‘read this.’ Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is such a book."—BODY Literature

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194064564
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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