An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. 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 theircadences, 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 fathersoaking/beside his left ear.' This is an unusual, important book: both gentleand 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.
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[In the body,where everything has a price - THRESHOLD]***
(Copper Canyon Press, 23 May 2016, ebook,70 pages, borrowed from the National Poetry Library)
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This is my first time reading the poet and it definitely won't be my last. Reading these poems was pure pleasure. The poems are beautiful written and lyrical. This collection offers some of the best contemporary poems I've read in ages. I'm a little inawe of Vuong's talent. The poems explore varied themes from mythology to the experience of Vietnamese refugees. The styles of poems are diverse from more traditional ones to poems with unusual structure including footnotes. I loved them all. My favourites are Threshold, A Little Closer to the Edge, MyFather Writes from Prison, The Gift, Into the Breach and Queen Under TheHill.