Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the extraordinary debut from young Vietnamese American poet, Ocean Vuong. Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, this book of poetry is unlike any other.

Steeped in themes of 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. He attends to these themes with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, and 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. Its blend of humanity and power marks it as one of the best first collections of poetry to emerge from America in years.

"Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move—he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition." —New Yorker

"These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation." —Andrew McMillan

A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year and a PBS Summer Recommendation.