Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds doesn’t simply come from nowhere; it advocates rather forcefully for its author’s emerging voice. It feels like a bone-breaker, and it sticks with you. Copper Canyon Press published it in 2016, and it has become a legend already, catching awards like the T. S. Eliot and the Forward prizes. It is unusual for a book to receive this much love, and there’s something to it: Vuong is changing what it is we think American poetry can do.

His poems dwell in the place where pain and history connect. The speaker’s always hanging just on one side — of language, of country, of a room where the past is still getting dressed. He writes: “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.” Desire and loss come to be two sides of the same thing. What begins sexy becomes a tempest, and then music that cannot bear the pressure. Vuong makes the body both a window and an instrument, as well as a borderscape whose brink can only be inhabited by the same people who have been pushed to the edge in America; love sounds like a “guitar with broken strings” because it’s been “twisted by the body it loves.”

This is a book about what breaks us. He says, “He moves like any / other fracture, revealing the briefest / doors. The dress / petaling off him like the skin / of an apple.” These are not mere pretty words; they are means of transforming damage into beauty, of letting violence get a word in edgewise without taking over. Petally dress on someone make you think on an antinomian as apple tree. His skin is a kind of memory, knowledge and shame, paradise and suffering. Vuong never lets you forget the ethics of love; he always attends to the mess he’s inherited.

Show me how ruin / makes a home / out of hip bones.” It’s like he is showing you how to stay alive and caressing you. His poems quite often do this — order like a touch — yet they request lessons, not performances: teach me how to live after history is dead already. He delivers it without adornment: “The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, / must tighten / around a bullet / to make it speak.” A gun is a mouth, and speech is bullets. It is not metaphorical so much as how reality infects our ability to love by way of the languages of violence and spectacle — America’s favourites. “My son, tell them / the body is a blade that / sharpens / by cutting.” That slap hits you hard, why it is so painful to be a man: to be sharp, you have to be cut. But the poems push back, and insist you can use that edge to be gentle, that you can protect, and protect without hurting.

Vuong isn’t merely speaking abstractly about history. One of the finest poems, “Aubade with Burning City,” places the fall of Saigon beside “White Christmas,” which was broadcast on Armed Forces Radio as a coded message to evacuate: “By the time I arrived, you were legend:/ the meteor who fell through our atmosphere/ to lie sun-damaged, oversunned in the flagrancy/ of shouts and foxholes, medicine, the suppertime banter of American.”It is a jarring combination: a happy song turned countdown, a reminder of a slipped empire. The poem lands somewhere between waking and dreaming, with the visuals of flowers alongside tanks and helicopters to set the tone of styling of Berlin’s music, taking something sentimental and making it brutal. To read it is to feel that your memories are slowly devolving into a nightmare. That White Christmas ended up as a code is not a trick, but Vuong turns it into a prayer for the disremembered.

Vuong’s work is speaking along these lines. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is in the tradition, following upon Frank O’Hara and Roger Reeves, of poets composing correspondence to themselves. It is important that he does this, situates his queer Vietnamese American voice right in the centre of American poetry. The O’Hara/Reeves/Vuong hub is a demonstration of how poets pass things around, how they take care of each other, a sort of tender adoption.

What distinguishes Night Sky with Exit Wounds is how it never lets you forget the war that makes its twinkling beauty possible. “Instead, let it be the echo to every footstep/ drowned out by rain, cripple the air like a name.”But the poem isn’t just quaking. The speaker becomes both the designate and the one seeking forgiveness: “like the footsteps of ghosts / misted through rain / as I lower myself between the sights – & pray/ that nothing moves.” The poem lets the body prepare to shoot while praying to prevent it. Vuong is always employing the language of violence to undo it with love.

At times the poems are more like aphorisms, refined by ache: “this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.” For even as a brightness, you must eat something up. If there is a philosophy of desire here, it is one of hunger: “The way light / keeps its shadow / by swallowing it.” Which is why he keeps repeating, a fleet refrain: “You, drowning / between my arms – / stay. / You, pushing your body / into the river / only to be left / with yourself – / stay.” The person he loves is drowning and diving both, and all he wants to do is pull them out, hold them, but also he wants them to be seen, to stay inside the act of being seen.

If the book has a mood, it is dusk: “Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.”It is a moment of murk and compromise. The poem demands for sweetness that hurts, a knife from whatever that is good. Vuong makes opposites out of the same stuff. He just keeps carving out these paradoxes: “You carve & carve / until a coin of light appears / & you get to look in, at last, / on happiness. The eye / staring back from the other side – / waiting.” It is as if you have to buy joy, with happiness stamped on the back side of pain. To peek inside is also to be watched; the eye on the other side — the past, your mother, America — sees you arriving, judging and blessing you.

Vuong writes, “Because what you heard, or will hear, / is true: I wrote / a better hour onto the page.”This is not braggadocio; it is a promise. The poem isn’t just about showing things; it sets them in place. It makes time different. So when he says, “Maybe the tongue is also a key,” you know what he means: language doesn’t merely narrate, it liberates. Vuong is haunted by other keys — safety, ignition, handcuffs — and the tongue is one of them, a tool and an entryway. The thing can even harm you; it can slice your hand. But what else might be able to open the lock?

His poetry — Vietnam seen from the inside of American English — speaks to other tales of leaving and returning home. Like the “Odyssey” of Homer, it is a story of return in a foreign tongue. Like Ovid’s Metamorphose, its transformations are of language as much as bodies. A lover becomes an apple; a bullet becomes speech; a son becomes the blade “thatsharpens / by cutting.” sharpens and / cuts. The poems know that changing is a plan and also a scar. If The Waste Land is the big poem about the broken world, Vuong’s is about the emptiness of diaspora — a thing that holds things because it has holes in it. Where Eliot famously made something of fragments, Vuong makes wounds into windows, or perhaps just flings the wounded windows open, offers its internal storm to “look back in.”

But the book returns so often to the feel of things. The dead don’t just vanish into the history books; they insist on being here. “the way the hunted, / for centuries, must bend / over its own reflection / to drink.” The hunted has to come face to face with an altered version of themselves — the face in the water always moving, messed up by the same mouth that wants it. If these poems criticize America, they often do so hidden in a kiss or a family tie: the fanged violence of the nation is always present. Vuong’s emphasis on tenderness is not just sentimental; it’s a form of resistance.

People are correct when they say that Aubade with Burning Cityis the heart of the book, combining large historical events with intimate emotion. Tanks roll as “White Christmas” snows down; a helicopter is pulling the “living just out of reach.” It is the cold ceremony of evacuation, how empires depart, like a melody everybody has heard. That the poem is couched in a real historical code makes it all the more effective, a reminder that poetry can make use of history without being subject to it. Vuong translates history into music the body can use.

Vuong’s success does not belong to him alone; it belongs as much to those around him. His debut reimagines the immigrant novel and war novel,according to critics who feel his novel is not predicated solely on the pain of each. It opens up a world where queerness and diaspora aren’t only subjects but ways of seeing the world. The fact that the reception of the book changed the way immigrant work is reviewed is part of an American story, not fitting into a tradition, but speaking out.

For Vuong, speaking out involves attending to the littlest things: sounds, hairs, breaths. “All that remains of the sentence / is a line / of black hair stranded / at my feet.”Rabih Alameddine at my feet. Not many poets would attend to such small, strange particulars — a whole language breaking off like a body — and believe that the reader could hear the quiet catastrophe. It is not only what you are saying but also what you are leaving behind: after you speak, what remains? What after history has finished talking is at our feet? It is the body’s cast-offs that concern Vuong; hair, skin, apple peels, the empty husk of a word.

The book also addresses the tradition of witness bearing. You can make out Celan’s demand that poetry can’t afford to not register the century’s horror and Baldwin’s muscular willingness to speak to you straight up, making you feel both seen and judged. Vuong is not stealing their tropes; he is tuning their instruments to his own time. He knows that modernism’s trick of blending different tunes can be put to use for hope as well as for despair. Where Eliot layered references into a ruin, Vuong layers intimacy into something that mends.

If there is a statement about poetry in these poems, it is this: The world is pain is real, but it does not have the final word. The poem must do what I have written — hold both those things at once, the idea that tenderness and terror live side by side; that to name something is to mark it; that love doesn’t heal a wound but love can teach you how to live with a wound. The photographs tell us about this double knowledge. “The way light / keeps its shadow / by swallowing it.”You can’t have a light without eating. “You, drowning / between my arms – / stay.” No rescue without asking someone to remain present.

Vuong has said that clichés may actually be salvageable, that they are the fossils of feeling, worn smooth but still legible. One of the remarkable things about Night Sky with Exit Wounds is seeing him resuscitate language. The New Yorker has said that he’s in the business of “the afterlife of language” — how a phrase can be emptied by overuse, and then filled anew with risk. The poems demonstrate this line by line, which is to say that they take what English believes it knows about love, war, the body and runs it through the fire until it sings true.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds is one of the great books about becoming. Like Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” it fashions the self as a country in construction. Along with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’sDictee, it exemplifies the effort of speaking as a regimen of recall. Like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, it approaches queer desire as something both ancient and something burning right now. Vuong’s talent is grasping this madness all in one living beast, a house with doorways where every door is also a scar.

But for all its erudition, the book never loses the body. The poems are rife with commands that function as first aid and rite at once. “Show me how ruin / makes a home / out of hip bones.” “My son, tell them / the body is a blade that / sharpens / by cutting.” “Maybe the tongue is also a key.”These aren’t mere metaphors; they are rules of life when you’ve inherited danger, and when memory is a weapon you have to learn to hold without pulling the trigger. The remarkable thing is that Vuong’s language continues to find ways to disarm itself. “The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, / must tighten / around a bullet / to make it speak”—the poem tightens —but then it stops the shot with another kind of speech, the one that doesn’t hurt the sky.

It is hardly surprising that the book returns again and again to rain — its mercy and its blindness.Instead, let it be the echo to every footstepdrowned out by rain, cripple the air like a name…“like the footsteps of ghosts / misted through rain / as I lower myself between the sights – & pray that nothing moves.” Rain is both cloak and chorus, the most frequent weather of grief. It covers up tracks while it amplifies their echo, the way that writing — lowering oneself between the sights — can both aim and forgive. The prayer that nothing will be moved is, effectively, a prayer for the poem to stand in for the shot.

Much of Vuong’s art is about replacing — changing — “this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.”: a Violence becoming speech. “Dusk a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.” Sweetness became a weapon, and then it was wicked up. “You carve & carve / until a coin of light appears…”,where the eye turns back to itself as Observer, Accuser, twice disreputable and beyond that & into the green light that comes up. You finish the book feeling that to make a poem is whisper“tighten[ing] / around a bullet / to make it speak”—a controlled pressure that doesn’t become murder.

The book takes place at a particular moment in history, but its message has extended elsewhere. And it was not only the prize; it changed how readers and critics conceived what poetry is, turning immigrant life from a topic on the edge of American poetry into a full component of it, so that English is no longer just a way to join in, but itself, to paraphrase Alexander Pope in a poem about another kind of transplant, a place to be remade. The movement between juries and countries, British and American, for Night Sky with Exit Wounds illustrates how personal stories can be heard by anyone.

And in the end, what is it that remembers us? Perhaps not the country, but the words we somehow manage to say. “All that remains of the sentence / is a line / of black hair stranded / at my feet.”That is evidence you were here, the body’s claim on the text that sought to possess it. Kim’s brand of longing these poems pursue, and contest: On an on, always daring to inch through the doors they have opened enough to call the room out as though it is not a room where they are being held; the room of a poem being the world of a poem, as each other poem Vuong writes crosses its embroidered breach to another world of poems. “You, drowning / between my arms – / stay… You, pushing your body / into the river / only to be left / with yourself – / stay.” If there is a message here, it is about staying: staying with yourself when the world is always telling you rather to go away.

Poetry, as we say, requires attentiveness. Vuong offers us ways to see things we didn’t know we needed: a love song as a weapons check. “Because what you heard, or will hear, / is true: I wrote / a better hour onto the page.” That better hour isn’t perfect. It is just time free from harm sufficient to let face be face, body a home, tongue a key. And if, every now and again, the poem must still be keen, then it should be so as if: “The way light / keeps its shadow / by swallowing it.” “They say this road downs men,” Vuong begins, “as many men as it spits up.” The word “as” shifts the meaning slightly—the road is a ravenous beast, consuming and then vomiting back up countless men—and it also leaves room, between itself and the word “spits,” for a sly rhyme to take shape in the silence of the sentence, which “straps the blade to the slave” and “sticks the blade in the fat mouth.” In Night Sky with Exit Wounds, the key fits the lock and the lock opens out into the rain, and through the keyhole the man isn’t even showering; the rain falls through him, “makes music of his shoulders.” The strings break, but in that breaking the poem begins to hum.

In other words, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a game-changer that even those who read poetry on the leap and fall will keep taking off the shelf and returning to without an occasion other than I-can’t-possibly-go-on-living-unless-I-do. Vuong shows us that poetry can hold to the things that break without making them pretty, that desire and displacement, memory and loss, can live together without falling apart. His poems speak to Whitman, Eliot, Carson, Cha and Baldwin but are still entirely his own — fluent, true and silent bold. What you are left with after the last line is not just the beauty, but the quiet insistence that language, honed by attention, can amount to a key: one that doesn’t promise escape, but that offers the act of staying — with the wound, with the body, with the fragile, necessary possibility of love.

A Kashmir University Postgraduate Gold medalist in English Literature, Wani Nazir, from Pulwama J&K India, is an alumnus of the University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He is the author of a poetic collection, “…and the silence whispered” and “The Chill in the Bones “. Presently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K, he has been writing both prose and poetry in English, Urdu and in his mother tongue Kashmiri. He is a voracious and wild reader and a reviewer. He contributes his brain-children-his poetry and prose in KashurQalam, The Significant League, Muse India e-Journal, Setu-a bilingual e-journal published from Pittsburgh, USA, Langlit& Literary Herald – both UGC approved journal, the CafeDissensus and Learning and Creativity – a Silhouette Magazine, the Dialogue Times – a journal published from London, and has been receiving laurels for his beautiful writings.