The father's aggression is contrasted with the quiet benevolence of the mother, who still finds time to teach her son to read, despite working long hours at a nail salon and barely knowing English herself. The speaker's mother also features prominently in this section, and she appears most notably in "The Gift" and "Headfirst," where she is a figure of love and wisdom. The father is depicted as a fearsome, violent man who also contains the capacity for compassion. Other poems in this section focus on the speaker's father, and their relationship, such as "My Father Writes From Prison," "Always & Forever," "Telemachus," and "In Newport Beach I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek to a Beached Dolphin's Wet Back." Here, Vuong focuses on the nature of father-son relationships when the father carries the weight of past traumas. These poems connect to the themes of family and the legacy of the Vietnam War, and the latter two feature the recurring characters of the speaker's mother and father. "Aubade with Burning City" details the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, and "A Little Closer to the Edge" and "Immigrant Haibun" describe the speaker's parents before his birth.
Poems like "Aubade with Burning City" "A Little Closer to the Edge," and "Immigrant Haibun," all take place prior to the speaker's birth. The first section of the book contains 11 poems, and jumps back and forth temporally, although for the most part it details events from earlier parts of the speaker's life. In this first poem, the reader sees that the speaker's relationship with his father and his own body is troubled, but that the speaker yearns for them to be connected. It serves to introduce the theme of fraught father-son relationships, as well as the theme of the body and human connection. "Threshold" introduces the main speaker of the collection, as well as the character of his father, who is the most important character in the book, other than the speaker. Time and ages are not referred to often, so it is hard to tell exactly when each poem takes place. The collection does not follow a strict linear narrative, and the poems take place at different times in various parts of the book, however, the three sections do follow a loose timeline, with the first section detailing events from early in the speaker's life, and the third section describing more recent occurrences. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is broken into three untitled sections, with the introductory poem "Threshold" preceding the start of the first section. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Vuong, Ocean.
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