Promotional Information

Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize
Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
PBS Summer Recommendation

'Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move- he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.' New Yorker

About the Author

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City.

Reviews

Night Sky With Exit Wounds…startled me with its urgency and its relevance. A eerily sure-footed debut.
*Observer, Books of the Year*

Vuong writes with a piercing, dreamlike clarity.
*Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year*

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*

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.
*Refinery29*

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.
*Observer*

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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*Literary Review*

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.
*Irish Times*