Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Described 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. 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. The poems included talk not just of the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but of a world brimming with hope and wonder. As the New Yorker recorded, “reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition....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.” Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952 The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.  & I said Yes because you asked me  to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god  only listens when we’re this close  to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you.  How my greatest accolade was to walk  across the Brooklyn Bridge  & not think of flight. How we live like water: wetting  a new tongue with no telling  what we’ve been through. They say the sky is blue  but I know it’s black seen through too much distance.  You will always remember what you were doing  when it hurts the most. There is so much  I need to tell you – but I only earned  one life. & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth  at the end. The TV kept saying The planes…  The planes...& I stood waiting in the room  made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing  into four blurred walls. & you were there.  You were the window. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2017 Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2017