Night Sky with Exit Wounds is his first poetry collection. Now, let it be made clear — this book isn’t a pleasant read. Vuong’s subject position as both a gay man and a son to immigrant parents means he is intimately familiar with the heritage of loss and violence he inescapably carries, and that is all too clear in his poetry. But here is a writer who, despite the condition of being alienated in white America, and the lingering memory of the Vietnam War, uses language to understand himself and the conditions that form who he is, and live an emotionally fulfilling life in the process. There is pleasure there, seeing that journey take place from the first page to the last.