'The poetry is a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.' - The New Yorker His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. 'Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.

'Vuong writes with a piercing, dreamlike clarity.' - Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year A eerily sure-footed debut.' - Rupert Thomson, The Observer, Books of the Year startled me with its urgency and its relevance. Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952 From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.” 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. The poems included talk not just of the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but of a world brimming with hope and wonder. 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. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2017ĭescribed 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.

The night sky with exit wounds