The book’s epigraph is from Bei Dao’s ‘Untitled’, translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong.
‘Threshold’ borrows and alters a phrase from Carl Phillips’s ‘Parable’.
‘Aubade with Burning City’ borrows lyrics from ‘White Christmas’, a song written by Irving Berlin.
The epigraph for ‘Immigrant Haibun’ is from Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop.
‘The Gift’ is after Li-Young Lee.
The title ‘Always & Forever’ is also the name of my father’s favorite song, as performed by Luther Vandross.
‘Anaphora as Coping Mechanism’ is for L.D.P.
The title ‘Queen Under The Hill’ is from Robert Duncan’s poem ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’. The poem borrows and alters language from Eduardo Corral’s poem ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’.
‘Notebook Fragments’ borrows a phrase from Sandra Lim’s ‘The Dark World’; Nguyễn Chí Thiện was a Vietnamese dissident poet who spent a total of twenty – seven years in prison for his writings. While incarcerated, with no pen and paper, he composed and committed his poems to memory.
The title ‘Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong’ is after Frank O’Hara and Roger Reeves.
‘Devotion’ is for Peter Bienkowski.
A pot of steaming jasmine tea for the editors of the publications in which some of these poems have appeared, sometimes in different forms:
The American Poetry Review, Assaracus, Beloit Poetry Journal, BODY Literature, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Dossier, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Gulf Coast, Linebreak, Narrative, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Normal School, PANK, Passages North, Pleiades, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Ireland, The Poetry Review, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, Southern Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and Verse Daily.
‘Eurydice’ was reprinted in The Dead Animal Handbook (2015); ‘Ode to Masturbation’ was reprinted in Longish Poems (2015); ‘Always & Forever’, ‘Daily Bread’, ‘Prayer for the Newly Damned’, and ‘Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds’ were reprinted in The BreakBeat Poets (2015); ‘Deto(nation)’, ‘Eurydice’, ‘Homewrecker’, and ‘Telemachus’ were reprinted in Poets On Growth (2015); ‘Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds’ was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize (2014); ‘Anaphora as Coping Mechanism’ was reprinted in Best New Poets 2014; ‘Telemachus’ was the winner of the 2013 Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal; ‘Prayer for the Newly Damned’ was a winner of the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets from the American Poetry Review.
I am grateful to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, for time and support.
Thank you to Robin Robertson and Jonathan Cape for believing.
Thanks to Frances Coady for your insurmountable faith in my work.
Thank you to my dear friends, teachers and editors for helping me.
Thank you, Peter, for Peter.
Ocean Vuong was born outside Saigon in 1988. At the age of two, after a year in a refugee camp, he and his family arrived in the US. He is the first in his immediate family to learn how to read proficiently. A Ruth Lilly fellow and winner of a Pushcart Prize, he has received honours and awards from Poets House and the Academy of American Poets. Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the 2016 Whiting Award. Ocean Vuong lives in New York.
An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other:
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase…
…Do you know who I am,
Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer
is the bullet hole in the back, brimming
with seawater.
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’
This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.
In the body, where everything has a price,
I was a beggar. On my knees,
I watched, through the keyhole, not
the man showering, but the rain
falling through him: guitar strings snapping
over his globed shoulders.
He was singing, which is why
I remember it. His voice –
it filled me to the core
like a skeleton. Even my name
knelt down inside me, asking
to be spared.
He was singing. It is all I remember.
For in the body, where everything has a price,
I was alive. I didn’t know
there was a better reason.
That one morning, my father would stop
– a dark colt paused in downpour –
& listen for my clutched breath
behind the door. I didn’t know the cost
of entering a song – was to lose
your way back.
So I entered. So I lost.
I lost it all with my eyes
wide open.
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city
beyond the shore is no longer
where we left it. Because the bombed
cathedral is now a cathedral