Yes, here’s a room so warm & blood-close, I swear, you will wake- & mistake these walls for skin. Here’s a desk with the gimp leg & a brick to make it last. Your dead friends passing through you like wind through a wind chime. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world. The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. Don’t be afraid, the gunfire is only the sound of people trying to live a little longer. You asked for a second chance & are given a mouth to empty into. How you use it again & again to find your own hands. & here the moment, just after the lights go out, when you can still see the faint torch between his legs. Here’s the man whose arms are wide enough to gather your leaving. Just call it horizon & you’ll never reach it. Here’s the house with childhood whittled down to a single red tripwire. Ocean, are you listening? The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother’s shadow falls. Like how the spine won’t remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement. Your father is only your father until one of you forgets. The end of the road is so far ahead it is already behind us.

Pulitzer Prize winners and never-before-published writers are equals during our manuscript evaluation process, whose goal is to identify and print works that promise to be, in the famous words of Ezra Pound, 'news that stays news.' Through its commitment to excellence, The Georgia Review has won numerous awards and earned an international reputation, and selections from its pages are regularly reprinted in the nation’s most prestigious prize anthologies.Ocean, don’t be afraid. An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate. Never stuffy and never shallow, The Georgia Review seeks a broad audience of intellectually open and curious readers-and strives to give those readers rich content that invites and sustains repeated attention and consideration. Each quarterly issue offers a diverse, thoughtfully orchestrated gathering of short stories, general-interest essays, poems, reviews, and visual art. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.'2016 Whiting Award citation ' Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. Founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published there ever since, The Georgia Review is one of America’s most highly regarded journals of arts and letters.

Night sky with exit wounds poems