ocean vuong poems night sky with exit wounds

“Freedom,” he says, “is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

To Little Dog, the protagonist – so named by his family to protect him beneath a cloak of worthlessness – the world is an ugly place, in which beauty is made more so for the improbability of existing at all. A bird on a windowsill appears not as a bucolic symbol but “a charred pear”. In the novel, the world seen through a speeding car window “surges by like sidewise gravity”. He speaks, as he writes, in poetic imagery, what he calls “the metaphor as autobiography of the gaze”. Vuong is slight, with a silver earring in one ear and the habit of pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up his nose. Peter, his partner of 10 years, has taken the dog out.

We are in Vuong’s open-plan living room in Northampton, Massachusetts, a leafy college town where he teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. If Night Sky tackled the absent father as myth, then his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, reckons with the mother and grandmother who raised him and it is the influence of these women – courageous, difficult, devastated by the ripple effect of the Vietnam war – that forms the spine of the novel and asks the central question: after trauma, how do we love? When his father left, his mother got work in a nail salon, menial work for little reward and a quality of life that Vuong had no particular expectation of exceeding. As a two-year-old, he had been brought to the US from Vietnam as a refugee and settled with his family in the working-class town of Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong, who is 30, was not from a background from which writers traditionally emerge. The poems that came out of those night-time efforts were published in 2016 as Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the success of which still amazes the author – the book won a Whiting award that year, and in 2017 scooped both the Forward prize and the TS Eliot prize. When that editor falls asleep, I get to do what I want. “The editor in your head – the nagging, insecure, worrisome social editor – starts to retire.

“You get the last word of the day,” he says. It was more that writing in the off-hours relaxed his knack for self-criticism. It wasn’t just the sense of isolation that comes from being the only one awake, when “you look out of the window and it’s completely dark and you’re at sea in this little ship”. During the day, he studied literature at Brooklyn College and worked in a cafe. W hile he was an undergraduate, Ocean Vuong formed the habit of writing at night.

Ocean vuong poems night sky with exit wounds