Night Sky with Exit Wounds

The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016

New York Times, Critics Pick

Boston Globe, Best Books listing

Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books

San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year

Library Journal, Best Books of 2016

“There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”—New York Times

“From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—New Yorker

"Extraordinary."—Los Angeles Times

"Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival."—Boston Globe

Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant."

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.

& the body is more than

a portion of night—sealed

with bruises. Suppose you woke

& found your shadow replaced

by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful

& gone. So you take the knife to the wall

instead. You carve & carve

until a coin of light appears

& you get to look in, at last,

on happiness. The eye

staring back from the other side— Waiting.