Winner of the 2017 T S Eliot Prize Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection A Guardian Daily Telegraph Book of the Year PBS Summer Recommendation An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other Steeped in war & cultural upheaval & wielding a fresh new language Vuong writes about the most profound subjects
- love & loss conflict grief memory & desire
- & attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted graceful in their cadences passionate & hungry in their tender close attention the chief of policefacedown in a pool of Coca-Cola A palm-sized photo of his father soakingbeside his left ear' This is an unusual important book both gentle & visceral vulnerable & assured & its blend of humanity & power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years These are poems of exquisite beauty unashamed of romance & undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war the silences of history One of the most important debut collections for a generation' Andrew Mc Millan