Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Night Sky with Exit Wounds arrived as close to a legend as a poetry debut can: Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon in 1988, carried through a refugee camp to Hartford, Connecticut at the age of two, and became the first member of his family to read and write, and his first collection turned that inheritance into some of the most talked about poems of the decade. The book braids three strands that refuse to stay separate. There is the war before his birth, the Fall of Saigon and the American violence that made his family possible as well as broken, handled in poems where history arrives as inheritance. There is the father, absent, loved, feared, pulled from the sea and mourned in figures the book borrows from myth, Telemachus waiting given a refugee's revision. And there is desire, queer, tender, and dangerous, the young body discovering that beauty and harm share an address; another hears tenderness described as a thing to be beaten into. The style made the reputation: image after image of extraordinary rightness, a whispered intensity that reads as both intimate and ceremonial. British judges agreed with the American acclaim, and the UK edition won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, making Vuong, at twenty nine, the youngest winner in the prize's history and only its second debut; the judging chair W. N. Herbert praised its compellingly assured command of phrase and image making. The Whiting Award and the Forward Prize for a first collection had already come, and the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous soon made him famous beyond poetry.