Night Sky with Exit Wounds

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.

New Yorker

There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr Vuong’s sincerity and candour, and from his ability to capture specific moments in rime with photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Ocean Vuong is the Walt Whitman of Vietnamese American literature. Lyrical, expansive, sexual, provocative, he sings of the Vietnamese body and of Vietnamese history.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Literary Hub

The operatic voice of the book is vulnerable and unpredictable. Some of its strongest poems are also the strangest… It is an impressive, uneven, moving book about painful and important subjects – and is the work of a young poet who might, excitingly, say anything next.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times

Many of the poems in this, Vuong’s debut collection, achieve lift-off amid comparable scenes of drama and desperation… This is a book full of promise.

David Wheatley, Literary Review

Taking war and cultural upheaval in its stride, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an assured but open debut collection. It’s accessible to non-poetry readers while offering sufficient depth to keep the experts engaged.

Aimee Grant Cumberbatch, Evening Standard

The poetry is a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide… I like the fragility, resilience and the sense that the stories that need telling are hardest to tell – a difficulty Ocean Vuong is courageously minded to overcome.

Kate Kellaway, Observer

If you only read one new book of poetry this year, make it Ocean Vuong’s game-changing debut collection. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is breathtakingly beautiful, gut-wrenching and sublime… Phenomenal.

Attitude

One of the most extraordinary first collections of poems in recent memory… The poems sear through the heart, Vuong finding the words and feelings to capture moments with complete clarity.

Alex Scott, Cent

Vuong writes in what may be one of the most unfashionable modes of recent decades, in the richly meditative style of Rainer Maria Rilke. And, almost unbelievably, he does so successfully… Vuong’s roomy, cool, risky poems are more than promising, and this is an exciting and compelling book.

John McAuliffe, Irish Times

His style is not unlike a wall of sounds, a relatively consistent, arrestedly pubescent palette of desire and obsession, turned up high enough to hit the pulse.

Declan Ryan, Times Literary Supplement

From its opening lines...the book brims with precise, surreal, erotic imagery… Vuong authoritatively lays claim to a range of symbols and tropes... Vuong possesses a large and unusual imagination… Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a remarkable debut. Where Vuong is headed is anyone’s guess, but you’ll want to go with him.

Paul Batchelor, New Statesman

Vuong’s words writhe and spin – his use of English is astonishing. He’s a smelter at his poetry, making words transform into something other than letters and meaning…. His gay love poems are stark, beautiful and utterly unnerving in their uncompromising adoration… A magical journey into Vuong’s imagination and talents and an astonishing debut collection.

Gscene

Vuong’s intimate lyrical voice, his precise, stark imagery and engagement with gay sexuality construct a familiar story of loss… Balancing memory and silence with erudition, Vuong’s poetry resists being so easily pinned down… Vuong’s poems, written with intelligence and tenderness, offer new spaces for becoming.

Sandeep Parmar, Guardian

His debut collection, praised for its "precise, stark" imagery, can be read both as a personal story – of gay sexuality, absent fathers and hyphenated identities – and as a highly erudite exploration of poetry’s possibilities.

Martin Doyle, Irish Times

His debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is the work of a man with history on his back, even if he has had to imagine some of it into being again. He brings a mythmaker’s insistence on being seen and heard to subjects ranging from the death of Telemachus’s father, from Homeric myth, to the fall of Saigon and common-or-garden masturbation.

Claire Armistead, Guardian

Night Sky With Exit Wounds…startled me with its urgency and its relevance. A eerily sure-footed debut.

Rupert Thomson, Observer, Books of the Year

Night Sky With Exit Wounds…contains poems of finely pitched, operatic feeling that unpick the violence and fragility of masculinity with wisdom and humour.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times

Vuong writes with a piercing, dreamlike clarity.

Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

Few poets in recent years have made such an immediate impact as Vuong.

Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph

By turns moving, charming and harrowing… An extraordinary, muscular first collection.

Neil D.A Stewart, Civilian

[Night Sky with Exit Wounds] is delicate, intimate and political.

Deborah Levy

Sometimes, I think of it as a song cycle; sometimes, a book of poems; sometimes, an epic. Vuong puts himself at the centre of this collection in an astonishing way, even as he is also entirely willing to set himself aside.

Alexander Chee, Frieze

Ocean Vuong is one of my auto-buy authors. I keep recommending his Night Sky With Exit Wounds to everyone; I can’t shout loud enough about it… I have quite a complicated relationship with what’s considered "classical poetry" but then someone like Ocean Vuong comes along, and he’s doing something so exciting that you can’t help but get caught up in it.

Sara Collins, Refinery29

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds... is beguiling and sublime.

Diana Evans, Guardian

Vuong's voice is unique and inspires empathy.

Eva Waite-Taylor, Independent

Beautiful... [Night Sky With Exit Wounds] is pretty special.

Francesca Hayward, Observer