Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a 2016 collection of poetry by Vietnamese American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong. After publication, the collection received much critical acclaim and in 2017, the book won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize. Vuong’s upbringing plays a key role in the subject matter of the poems in this collection, often making references to the fact that he was born on a rice farm in 1988 and spent a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before his family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam. Vuong was only two years old at the time.

Vuong’s poetic sensibility is a result of his own experiences, as well as events recounted to him by his family members. For example, in “Aubade With Burning City,” Vuong writes with vivid imagery about the Fall of Saigon in 1975, many of these images borrowed from the memory of his grandmother who would have witnessed these events first-hand. The poem is a combination of this imagery and lines from Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” the song broadcast to the Armed Forces, signaling that the final evacuation was underway. It is no wonder that Vuong felt it necessary to refer to this day in history, as it marked the end of the war and the beginning of the reunification of Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Vuong also notes the irony in the fact that his grandmother was married to an American serviceman, meaning that without the war, he and his family likely wouldn’t exist.

Vuong was the first in his family to learn to read, but his poetry is reflective of the history of oral tradition that exists in Vietnamese culture. He recalls many stories told to him by his grandmother, and they permeate his written works.



The first poem of the collection, “Threshold,” speaks to generational trauma. It specifically deals with Vuong’s relationship with his father, and his coming to terms with his own sexuality at a young age. Vuong’s father hovers like a dark and ominous figure over the bulk of the collection. He reappears again in “Always & Forever,” giving a gift to his son and telling him only to use it when he needs it most. Upon opening the box, the son finds a Colt .45, which inspires a disturbing chain of thoughts. It is both haunting and startlingly beautiful. Throughout the collection, Vuong often addresses the topic of trauma carried over generations, and what it might take to end the cycle.

In the second poem of the collection, “Telemachus,” Vuong writes hauntingly about finding his father’s body in the sea. In the poem, he turns his father’s corpse over to find a bullet hole in his back. The effect of his poetry is such that, even in discussing such grotesque details, there remains a certain lyrical beauty. In addition to the subject matter of his father and his family’s immigration, Vuong focuses heavily on the fact that he is a gay man, and the book contains several gay love poems, including “Because It’s Summer.” Vuong is a master of combining all of the elements that make him an outsider and weaving together something beautiful and real, full of emotional rawness. As Vuong reminds us, there is inescapable violence in living in America both as an immigrant and a gay man.

He depicts violence in its many forms, whether through the firing of missiles and warfare or guns touted by average folks in America, and the prevalence of domestic violence. Vuong’s poetry tends to focus on the fragility of human life, how we often think ourselves invincible, but how easily it can all end. It is the contrast between the seeming frivolity of attempting to thwart one’s mortality, but also the beauty in such striving that makes life worth living; this kind of beauty permeates the collection, causing it to resonate with readers of all kinds, hitting on something that is at the core of what it means to be human. Vuong stresses that it doesn’t take living through a war to have experienced violence and the full range of human emotion; everyday life is fraught with battles as well as victories.



In “Ode to Masturbation,” Vuong discusses his attempt at finding his sexuality, as though it were a specific location somewhere in America. He has a tendency to alternate the speaker from object to subject throughout his poems, as the speaker becomes more of a fully realized individual who is able to choose for himself what he likes instead of just being the object of someone else’s fantasy.

Vuong’s collection is really a testament to survival, as the author knew he must go on even when loved ones around him could not. Although he may have been tempted to drown alongside his father, Vuong kept focused on the act of resurfacing, creating a beautiful life for himself out of the ashes of his traumatic past.