The Vietnam War, interpersonal sexual encounters, and the tensions and violences within a family are all seamlessly linked by the languages of loss, craving, and passion.
It is what allows him to situate himself on September 11th in one poem (" Untitled"), to be Jackie Kennedy in another ("Of Thee I Sing"), and to recount the seemingly scattered yet eerily interlinked machinations of his mind ("Notebook Fragments"), all with a singular and cohesive voice. That the language of Night Sky with Exit Wounds is strange and neat, able to fit itself to a variety of situations, is one of Vuong's most stunning accomplishments. After all, as Claire Schwartz writes, "language lives in the body, which never wholly empties." As the body changes throughout the collection, so too does Vuong's language as he revisits events both historical and personal, turning them over like an object in the hands to view it from all sides. As Ocean Vuong navigates the politics and emotions of this changing body-from an observer and supplicant to an agent that is capable of loving others, harming them, and creating new things, so too does he trace the way that language is protean. In one poem, the body is fragile, but in the next, it is a testament to the stubborn truth of simply living despite hardship. Vaughan have noted, Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a collection that locates the intersection of all these tensions and conflicts in the body, which mutates throughout the collection to fill a variety of roles. Moreover, as critics like Michiko Kakutani and Christopher R. The collection itself is an exploration of the uncanny closeness between life and death, trauma and rebirth, nationhood and exile, pleasure and pain, parents and children, and love and violence.
Instead, what Vuong received was an offer for the work to be published, and the collection was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. Since Vuong thought that such a rejection would provide him with valuable information regarding next steps and meaningful advice on how to advance his writing, he submitted the poems to the contest with low expectations. Vuong initially wrote the poems in the collection and assembled them for an open contest that claimed each rejection would be personalized. Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the debut full-length poetry collection by Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong.
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