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    Night Sky with Exit Wounds
    Unavailable
    Night Sky with Exit Wounds
    Unavailable
    Night Sky with Exit Wounds
    Ebook100 pages45 minutes

    Night Sky with Exit Wounds

    By Ocean Vuong

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award

    One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2016"

    One of Lit Hub's "10 must-read poetry collections for April"

    Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. 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.”The New Yorker

    "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."Buzzfeed's "Most Exciting New Books of 2016"

    "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.”2016 Whiting Award citation

    "Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."LitHub

    "Vuong’s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identityall with a tremendous humanity."Slate

    In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty intoand culls fromindividual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the collection, as when he writes, Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won’t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.’”Publishers Weekly

    "What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is."Li-Young Lee

    Torso of Air

    Suppose you do change your life.
    & the body is more than

    a portion of nightsealed
    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.

    Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City, New York.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateMay 23, 2016
    ISBN9781619321564
    Unavailable
    Night Sky with Exit Wounds
    Author

    Ocean Vuong

    Ocean Vuong (Ciudad Ho Chi Minh, antes Saigón, 1988) emigró a Estados Unidos con su familia en 1990, tras pasar un año en un campo de refugiados en Filipinas. En 2014 recibió la beca Ruth Lilly / Sargent Rosenberg de la Poetry Foundation y con el poemario Cielo nocturno con heridas de fuego ganó el Whiting Award y el Forward Prize en Estados Unidos y el Premio T. S. Eliot en Inglaterra. Sus textos se han publicado en medios como The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker y The New York Times. Es profesor en el Amherst College de Massachusetts. En la tierra somos fugazmente grandiosos es su primera novela.

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    Reviews for Night Sky with Exit Wounds

    4/5

    194 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I honestly don't know what to say beyond this is the best collection of poetry I've read this year. I don't know how to adequately portray how good this book is. Vuong's use of language, violence, love, grief, anger, and memory is so exacting, so powerful...if you love poetry, read this. Now.
    • 3/5
      A fascinating new voice. The language flirts with all sorts of sensibilities: hints of the author's Vietnamese heritage, gentle explorations of sexuality, an almost-magical-realism at times. (Brian)
    • 4/5
      Pretty good, neo-expressionist influences on the Post-PM discourse. No wonder the author was awarded.
      What I did not like was that some poems were lamentations about things that did not happen in the author's lifetime, so... yes... pretty thin ethos there.
    • 4/5
      I find myself reading Ocean Vuong's work backwards in time. I felt I had to read On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, after all the richly-deserved and glorious reviews, and now I spin back to this previously published collection of poetry. After reading the much more accessible poetry of James Tate and Ron Padgett, washing up on the shores of Ocean Vuong's poetry, meant that I had to engage my mind more, as his poetry is more cerebral in nature. Maybe I'm just in a lazy state of mind, but his poetry didn't impress me half as much as his stunning fiction.
    • 5/5
      The title is very much apt, since this collection is a visceral topography of the author's personal and family history, invoking both his Vietnamese heritage and his sexuality through images and language that are bloody, frightening, tender, and even playful. Vuong has a great command of tone and line, and his voice is more evidence that we are living in an exciting time for contemporary poetics.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This award-winning collection of poetry showcases Vuong's talent for brutal imagery and evocative wordplay. Though I can't say how many, if any, are truly autobiographical, it appears that the poet draws on his own family history and experience as immigrants from Vietnam after surviving war, and his own experiences as a gay man, for much of his material. "Aubade with Burning City," for example, starts with a note that Armed Forces Radio gave the code to evacuate Saigon in 1975 by playing "White Christmas" and proceeds to intersperse lines from the song throughout in a brilliant, intense poem intertwining a man and woman in a hotel with war in the city. "Self Portrait as Exit Wounds" was another favorite of mine, using the symbolic language of a bullet's path to bring us through several intense scenes. I didn't always "get it." I had trouble with some of the more abstract language, trying to figure out what he was describing. One poem, with numbers scattered down the page and the language actually in notes at the bottom of the page, had a form that distracted me from really appreciating it. Overall, I'm glad I read it.
    • 4/5
      Intimate and delicate explorations of the big issues facing each human - family, love, romance, grief, ennui.
    • 4/5
      I read every word but understand only a shattered world of painful shards of cut and held connections and a constant imagery of grenades and their potential to destroy.
    • 5/5
      Night Sky With Exit Wounds????By Ocean Vuong2016Cooper Canyon PressThis volume of poetry centers on the emotions and emotional states that make us all human....love, family, loneliness, grief, sadness. This is a new author for me, but I really enjoyed the heart and soul of its poems. Very personal, but also easy to relate to on a personal level. He captures the feelings so perfectly. I will be looking for more from this clever and spirited poet.