--- product_id: 25622384 title: "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" price: "€ 49.61" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.at/products/25622384-night-sky-with-exit-wounds store_origin: AT region: Austria --- # Night Sky with Exit Wounds **Price:** € 49.61 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Night Sky with Exit Wounds - **How much does it cost?** € 49.61 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.at](https://www.desertcart.at/products/25622384-night-sky-with-exit-wounds) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description WINNER of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016 "There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Library Journal 2016 Best Books of the Year WINNER, 2016 Whiting Award WINNER, 2017 Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award FINALIST, 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award FINALIST, 2017 Lambda Literary Award In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these poems seek a myriad existence without forgetting the prerequisite of self-preservation in a world bent on extinguishing its othered voices. Vuong's poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers. Praise for Ocean Vuong: " Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition....His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion." --The New Yorker "[A] masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence." -- Buzzfeed Books "An important new voice in American poetry." -- Beloit Poetry Journal "What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is." --Li-Young Lee "[Vuong] takes from Pound the ability to eternalize a moment." -- POETRY "Even as Vuong leads you through every pleasure a body deserves and all the ensuing grief, these poems restore you with hope, that godforsaken thing--alive, singing along to the radio, suddenly sufficient." --Traci Brimhall "What this poet sees on the street, in a blizzard, or even while studying an apple reminds me of those dreams we have in common: dreams in which we are falling but never touch the ground, dreams in which we are naked in the presence of men suited for our ruin." --Jericho Brown Review: ‘Sometimes I ask for too much to feel my mouth overflow’ - In 2010 Ocean Vuong offered his first collection of poems – BURNINGS – and this reviewer wrote the following: ‘It is very difficult to read the poetry of Ocean Vuong: he gets inside the marrow and hides there for even a few moldy moments of memories that we've tried to erase. Perhaps not for everyone, this response. Likely for most these poems he collectively and intuitively titles BURNINGS will be simply the virtuosic, luminous constructions of a vividly experienced/inherited life. Ocean Vuong is Vietnamese, now living and writing and teaching in Massachusetts. He was born in Saigon in 1988, well after the US withdrawal of troops from that grossly wrong war, but his parents and grandparents carry the napalm smells and bitter battles in every cell of their bodies: Vuong's inheritance. And now, years away from that fetid error, his poems ask, if not force, us to recall that cancer that will never go away. So for those of us who experienced the Vietnam of which he speaks these poems are pockets of pain and renewed compassion. Ocean Vuong expresses the mind of a refugee as defined as any poet of our time. His poems can arrest the movement of our eyes, forcing them to accept the wrong that cannot be righted. But they can also create strange lullabies he recalls from the past, his past, our past. Vuong's perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. This is the work of a gifted cantor, singing of pain, singing of healing.’ NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, released in 2016, is Ocean’s second major volume of poetry, and returning to it now, in 2021, reiterates just how fine is his gift. He has become one of the more highly regarded men on the literary scene, both as a poet and a novelist, but no matter the form in which his words are dressed, the level of empathy glows. His perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. His poems embrace gender choices for lovers, and other needs. The book is successful on all levels and now stands as another trophy in the growing respect for this splendid artist. Very Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, October 21 Review: Quality - Good book ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #38,112 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1 in Asian American Poetry #10 in LGBTQ+ Poetry (Books) #45 in Love Poems | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 2,169 Reviews | ## Images ![Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/9161zsTJi3L.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Sometimes I ask for too much to feel my mouth overflow’ *by G***P on October 20, 2021* In 2010 Ocean Vuong offered his first collection of poems – BURNINGS – and this reviewer wrote the following: ‘It is very difficult to read the poetry of Ocean Vuong: he gets inside the marrow and hides there for even a few moldy moments of memories that we've tried to erase. Perhaps not for everyone, this response. Likely for most these poems he collectively and intuitively titles BURNINGS will be simply the virtuosic, luminous constructions of a vividly experienced/inherited life. Ocean Vuong is Vietnamese, now living and writing and teaching in Massachusetts. He was born in Saigon in 1988, well after the US withdrawal of troops from that grossly wrong war, but his parents and grandparents carry the napalm smells and bitter battles in every cell of their bodies: Vuong's inheritance. And now, years away from that fetid error, his poems ask, if not force, us to recall that cancer that will never go away. So for those of us who experienced the Vietnam of which he speaks these poems are pockets of pain and renewed compassion. Ocean Vuong expresses the mind of a refugee as defined as any poet of our time. His poems can arrest the movement of our eyes, forcing them to accept the wrong that cannot be righted. But they can also create strange lullabies he recalls from the past, his past, our past. Vuong's perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. This is the work of a gifted cantor, singing of pain, singing of healing.’ NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, released in 2016, is Ocean’s second major volume of poetry, and returning to it now, in 2021, reiterates just how fine is his gift. He has become one of the more highly regarded men on the literary scene, both as a poet and a novelist, but no matter the form in which his words are dressed, the level of empathy glows. His perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. His poems embrace gender choices for lovers, and other needs. The book is successful on all levels and now stands as another trophy in the growing respect for this splendid artist. Very Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, October 21 ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Quality *by O***L on February 11, 2026* Good book ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Stunning, haunting collection *by G***G on January 30, 2018* Poet Ocean Vuong spent the first two years of his life in a refugee camp. When he was two, he, His mother, and grandmother settled in the United States. He never knew his father. He grew up hearing the stories of Vietnam from his mother and grandmother. Born in a country he can't remember, and with a father he never knew, and likely asking questions that could never be answered, Vuong did what many of us might do. He created a past life. Part of that creation became "Night Sky with Exit Wounds," which won the 2016 Whiting Award and has now won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. The collection is comprised of some 35 poems. Several of the poems are directly about his father, and Vuong imagines different reasons (and realities) for not knowing him. His father was imprisoned. His father is shot and dumped in the ocean, his body washing up on a beach. His father drowns in Newport Beach, California. His father is caught up in what happened in Vietnam. His father is an American soldier. The family is sailing on a refugee boat, fleeing a burning city. Vuong creates these different realities to fill a void, a painful void, one that leaves the poet experiencing his own "exit wounds." The poet also imagines what might be his own creation. A Little Closer to the Edge Young enough to believe nothing will change them, they step, hand in hand, into the bomb crater. The night full of black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks from shattering against her cheek, now dims like a miniature moon behind her hair. In this version, the snake is headless-stilled like a cord unraveled from the lovers' ankles. He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press into her-as the field shreds itself with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home out of hip bones. O mother, O minute hand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season. Where apples thunder the earth with red hooves. & I am your son. The poem is filled with the kinds of sharp and vivid images and metaphors found throughout the collection - the faux Rolex watch dimming like a miniature moon, a home made of hip bones, a night full of black teeth, a headless snake, a field shredding itself with cricket cries. Vuong creates jarring, often disquieting, abrupt and unexpected pictures, almost forcing us to acknowledge a truth in these self-created realties. Vuong, in addition to the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, has received a number of other honors and recognitions - a Ruth Lilly Fellow; a Pushcart Prize; and honors from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and others. He received the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets from the American Poetry Review. His poems have been published in numerous literary and poetry journals, and he is the author of Burnings (2010). He is an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The poems of "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" are often graphic; several of the poems are about sex. Many of the poems imply that the absent father has led the poet on his own search for his fundamental identity. Tinged at times with anger, sadness, and yearning, it is a stunning, haunting collection. ## Frequently Bought Together - Night Sky with Exit Wounds - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel - Time Is a Mother --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.at/products/25622384-night-sky-with-exit-wounds](https://www.desertcart.at/products/25622384-night-sky-with-exit-wounds) --- *Product available on Desertcart Austria* *Store origin: AT* *Last updated: 2026-08-03*