Night Sky with Exit Wounds

"Yes, it’s really unsettling and revelatory and strange and brilliant. I think the way it juxtaposes violence with the everyday is powerful. There’s a poem in the book where Vuong juxtaposes scenes from the 1975 fall of Saigon with lines from the famous Bing Crosby song, “White Christmas” – quite seasonal right now, actually – and I find there’s more violence in that than just writing about violence. That’s what’s so remarkable: the way that chaos and normality are interposed. I really like the way he writes about the body as well – again, it’s quite violent – but I had this strange experience: I read this collection in a tent on a glacier in Greenland; I was on a mountaineering trip. It was one of the only things that I took with me to read and so I was reading it underneath the Northern Lights and the strange colours of the sky, like something lit – an almost broken and beautiful sky. So I was reading this collection, and the violence but the beauty of it – it was one of the most powerful reading experiences I’ve ever had. And the setting was part of that – books are always things that you can’t separate from the places that you read them in. I hadn’t thought of that, but, yes, I think that is the kind of thing that appeals to me – it’s everyday life. It’s Auden, isn’t it? That idea that suffering happens while the horse is getting on with its life, and there are people in other corners of the painting that don’t know that it’s going on. That idea is something I’ve always been really drawn to; it really gets me, that notion that suffering is also ordinary. And Vuong’s language is just extraordinary – it seems to fizz. There are some beautiful images – really visual images. In one poem there’s something about a piano in a field and it just stuck in my head – it’s such a strong visual motif. I’d never read any of his work before and it was very exciting – I will now, of course. I’d say this was my book of the year. It was such a revelation. And the way he writes about fathers is really brilliant and unsettling as well – there’s that everyday violence of judgement, small acts that reminded me of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen where she talks about “micro-aggressions.” That’s another book in recent years that’s had quite an impact on me."