Some of the poems touch on mythological themes, some touch on more realistic, violent ones, exploring the experience of Vietnamese refugees. Through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail In several poems, he imagines encounters with his father at various stages of his life. He imagines his father meeting violent or tragic, accidental ends, or even being imprisoned. This sense of emptiness is palpable through many of the 35 poems in this collection, as Vuong imagines reasons why his father wasn't part of his life. Vuong spent the first two years of his life living in a refugee camp, and he never knew his father. Eliot Prize, because some of his stanzas simply took my breath away. It certainly explains why this book won the 2016 Whiting Award and the 2017 T.S. I realized after reading the first few sentences of Vuong's first poem just how talented he is. It's amazing the breadth of talent that exists in this genre.
I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have been experimenting with over the last several weeks. To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker.īorn in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019).
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