Night Sky With Exit Wounds
A poetry collection that renders war, migration, loss, and queer selfhood in finely tuned language.
Work Information
A debut collection whose exactness and controlled music illuminate private history and public violence.
Personal memory and cross-border experience overlap, letting family history and national violence reverberate in a single voice. Beneath the clarity of the language runs a deep attachment to what has been lost.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Copper Canyon Pr
- Published
- 2016-04-05
- Pages
- 89 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.46 x 1.27 x 18.54 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781556594953
- ISBN-10
- 155659495X
- Price
- 2989 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
The New Yorker , The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times , Critics Pick Boston Globe , Best Books listing Miami Herald , Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle , Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal , 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 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 & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side— Waiting.
Ocean Vuong : Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.
Reviews
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Can't wait to read it!
Arrived in time and in good condition.
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love it
love this book, I am writing my dissertation on ocean vuong:)
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‘Sometimes I ask for too much to feel my mouth overflow’
In 2010 Ocean Vuong offered his first collection of poems – BURNINGS – and this reviewer wrote the following: ‘It is very difficult to read the poetry of Ocean Vuong: he gets inside the marrow and hides there for even a few moldy moments of memories that we've tried to erase. Perhaps not for everyone, this response. Likely for most these poems he collectively and intuitively titles BURNINGS will be simply the virtuosic, luminous constructions of a vividly experienced/inherited life. Ocean Vuong is Vietnamese, now living and writing and teaching in Massachusetts. He was born in Saigon in 1988, well after the US withdrawal of troops from that grossly wrong war, but his parents and grandparents carry the napalm smells and bitter battles in every cell of their bodies: Vuong's inheritance. And now, years away from that fetid error, his poems ask, if not force, us to recall that cancer that will never go away. So for those of us who experienced the Vietnam of which he speaks these poems are pockets of pain and renewed compassion. Ocean Vuong expresses the mind of a refugee as defined as any poet of our time. His poems can arrest the movement of our eyes, forcing them to accept the wrong that cannot be righted. But they can also create strange lullabies he recalls from the past, his past, our past. Vuong's perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. This is the work of a gifted cantor, singing of pain, singing of healing.’ NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, released in 2016, is Ocean’s second major volume of poetry, and returning to it now, in 2021, reiterates just how fine is his gift. He has become one of the more highly regarded men on the literary scene, both as a poet and a novelist, but no matter the form in which his words are dressed, the level of empathy glows. His perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. His poems embrace gender choices for lovers, and other needs. The book is successful on all levels and now stands as another trophy in the growing respect for this splendid artist. Very Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, October 21
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Life changing read
I want to tattoo this entire text on me so I won't forget it
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Heart-wrenchingly beautiful.
I cannot recommend this book enough. It is worth every penny and more. Vuong invites us into a space where he is vulnerable and intimate, and I found myself deeply emotional while reading many of the pieces. Finding this poetry collection was a turning point in my own work. Vuong's use of language, line breaks, and striking imagery are fantastic studies for any budding poet, and highly enjoyable to read and analyze. I can't wait for more!
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beautiful
really beautiful poetry book, def recommend
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 25 (2017) ・Winner