Available:*
Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Henington-Alief | Adult | Non-fiction | Book | 811 V994 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McGovern-Stella Link | Adult | Non-fiction | Book | 811 V994 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Southwest Express | Adult | Non-fiction | Book | 811 V994 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Young | Adult | Non-fiction | Book | 811 V994 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
One of the most celebrated poetry books of the year:
The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing NPR, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: "The poems in Mr. Vuong''s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds ...possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson''s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words...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."
"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 Yorke r
"The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible.... Highly recommended."-- Library Journal , starred review
"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, identity--all with a tremendous humanity."-- Slate
"In his impressive debut collection, Vuong writes beauty into--and culls from--individual, 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."-- Publishers Weekly
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.
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 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.
Author Notes
Ocean Vuong : 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.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into-and culls from-individual, 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." There are times when Vuong's intense sincerity edges too far toward sentimentality: "Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn./ Say autumn despite the green/ in your eyes." Yet these moments feel difficult to avoid in a book whose speakers risk so much raw emotion: "7:18am. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message. Couldn't listen/ to all of it. That makes three this year." By juxtaposing startling observations with more common images, Vuong forges poems that feel familiar, yet honest and original. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Vuong was named one of this year's Whiting Award recipients, and this debut collection (his chapbooks include Burnings, an American Library Association (ALA) Over the Rainbow selection) shows why. The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible. Born in Ho Chi Minh City in the late 1980s, Vuong can reignite scenes from his country's recent traumas; as Saigon falls, "Milkflower petals in the street/ like pieces of a girl's dress" drift over the dead and injured, and the city lies "so white it is ready for ink" ("White Christmas" really played on the airwaves at the time). Elsewhere, the pain and glory of young love and young life emerge ("Show me how ruin makes a home/ out of hip bones.// teach me to hold a man the way thirst// holds water"). VERDICT Highly recommended. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.