"Time is a Mother felt like an imprint of Ocean Vuong’s soul onto the page, with a searing honestly few writers achieve. More than this, he addresses the intense weight of life’s pains with a bold claim of agency over life in the acts of breathing, feeling, surviving. Vuong hides nothing, owns everything, and demands the reader’s same vulnerability of emotion. It’s nothing less than stunning, and I’ll be thinking on these poems for a long time."
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication Date 2023-06-06
Section New Titles - Paperback / Poetry / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Summer P.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780593300251
A TIME Magazine Best Book of 2022
The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
