Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2017

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2017

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