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.

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70 pages

Average rating: 7.93

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Community Reviews

itsmetheresac
Mar 30, 2023
8/10 stars
Lovely.
winona_reads
Mar 28, 2023
10/10 stars
favorite quotes:
'he said the shadow of missiles growling larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us. he said there is so much i need to tell you.'
'there are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on'
'he laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.'
'how sweet. the rain. how something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.'
'water whittled down to intention. intuition into nourishment. everyone can forget us- as long as you remember.'
'theres a lighthouse/ some nights you are the lighthouse/ some nights the sea/ what this means is that i dont know/ desire other than need/ to be shattered and rebuilt/ the mind forgetting/ the body's crime of living.'
'but only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart.'
'this is how we loved: a fifth of vodka, & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers through my hair- my hair a wildfire'
'in the museum of the heart there are two headless people building a burning house'
'the body was made soft to keep us from loneliness. you said that as if the car were filling with river water'
'how it never fails to fail so accurately'
'he dies as your heart beats faster.'
'he dies when you wake and its november forever'
'beauty despite daylight'
'...until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. how i wanted to be that sky- to hold every flight & fall at once.'
'that so say your name is to hear the sound of clocks being turned back another hour.'
'look, my eyes are not your eyes'
'some call this being human but you already know it's the briefest form of forever'
'to be afraid to be this luminous, to be so bright so empty'
'i want nothing more than my breaths'
'i enter my life the way words entered me- by falling through silence'

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