Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Paperback)

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

'Vuong writes with a piercing, dreamlike clarity.' - Tristram Fane Saunders, 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.' - The New Yorker

'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.' - Kate Kellaway, The 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.' - Michiko Kakutani, The 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.' - Viet Thanh Nguyen

'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.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod, 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.' - David Wheatley, The 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.' - John McAuliffe, The Irish Times

'Taking war and cultural upheaval in its stride, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an assured but open debut collection. It's accessible to non-poetry readers while offering sufficient depth to keep the experts engaged.' - Aimee Grant Cumberbatch, The Evening Standard

'If you only read one new book of poetry this year, make it Ocean Vuong's game-changing debut collection. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is breathtakingly beautiful, gut-wrenching and sublime... Phenomenal.' - Attitude

'His style is not unlike a wall of sounds, a relatively consistent, arrestedly pubescent palette of desire and obsession, turned up high enough to hit the pulse.' - Declan Ryan, The Times Literary Supplement

'From its opening lines...the book brims with precise, surreal, erotic imagery... Vuong authoritatively lays claim to a range of symbols and tropes... Vuong possesses a large and unusual imagination... Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a remarkable debut. Where Vuong is headed is anyone's guess, but you'll want to go with him.' - Paul Batchelor, New Statesman

'Vuong's intimate lyrical voice, his precise, stark imagery and engagement with gay sexuality construct a familiar story of loss... Balancing memory and silence with erudition, Vuong's poetry resists being so easily pinned down... Vuong's poems, written with intelligence and tenderness, offer new spaces for becoming.' - Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian

'His debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is the work of a man with history on his back, even if he has had to imagine some of it into being again. He brings a mythmaker's insistence on being seen and heard to subjects ranging from the death of Telemachus's father, from Homeric myth, to the fall of Saigon and common-or-garden masturbation.' - Claire Armistead, The Guardian