Night Sky with Exit Wounds

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016

Critics Pick
Best Books listing
Best LGBTQ Books
Top 100 Books of the Year
Best Books 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." - New York Times

"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

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence, and are unrepentant.

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night-sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
and you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side—
Waiting.