VUONG, OCEAN
Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. New Yorker
An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention:
the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear. This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.
These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation. Andrew McMillan
