Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon and moved as a child refugee to Connecticut, before moving to New York City to become a writer. When he couldn't afford a place to sleep, he spent nights writing poetry at Penn Station.

In his haunting and fearless debut, Vuong walks a tightrope of vulnerability and reflects upon his family in exile, a reverential queer love, and the personal adoption of a sometimes inexplicable nation. Vuong's poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers.

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than

a portion of nightsealed
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 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2014 Pushcart Prize, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City, New York.