Ocean Vuong has a talent for expressing the hardest, deepest, feelings with such grace and beauty. This collection touches on themes of grief and family, the process of becoming who we really are, and the experimental structures serve to enhance the language and the feelings expressed. This collection is daring and bold, heartbreaking and celebratory, it is utterly readable and mesmerizing.

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong is a moving and lyrical exploration of grief, memory, and the complexity of human emotions. Vuong's poetic talent shines throughout the collection, weaving personal and universal themes with raw honesty. The book feels like a journey through loss, love, and identity, with Vuong's words resonating deeply emotionally.

One of the remarkable features of this collection is how Vuong balances the personal with the political. He blends his experiences as a Vietnamese-American with broader reflections on family, culture, and the passage of time. As a result, the work feels intimate and expansive, inviting readers to immerse themselves in his world. Ocean Vuong proves himself as a master of language, crafting poetry that is haunting and beautiful.

This was a great collection of poetry that deals with heavy topics in a graceful way that is so uniquly Ocean Vuong. Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this collection of poetry! This is definitely one of my favorite poetry collections I've read this year.

There are few who can break my heart in the particular way that Ocean Vuong's words can. A wonder and joy to read.

I was a bit disappointed by this one, after having loved his first book so much. His prose is affecting in some parts, and stirs memories of the stories about his mother in his first book.

Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection Time is a Mother is demanding. However, what it demands is different from his masterful debut Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a collection that introduces us to the world of the writer. In verve that shines through careful, cutting language, Vuong’s poems in his debut collection are set against his personal history as a Vietnam-born American—regardless of the extent to which he acknowledges war and heritage in each poem, he depicts his experiences with his family and sexuality as being intimately related to them. The clear charm of Night with Exit Wounds is lost in Time is a Mother, which requires an antecedent investment in Vuong’s life in order to navigate the collection’s chaotic bricolage. Reading the poems, I felt a sudden guilt at failing to follow the poems’ content, as if I were a friend of his who had forgotten the details of his life that he had shared to me at lunch one afternoon.

This reaction isn’t entirely surprising. At the time of writing, dozens of comments litter the book’s Goodreads page, even though the book has yet to be released to the public. One reviewer wrote that “ocean vuong has single handedly saved 2022 and it hasn’t even started yet.” Another exclaimed “ocean vuong do you not care for my mental health,” while the collection is still listed as to-read on their profile. Another reviewer looking forward to the collection’s release said that “if ocean vuong wrote it, i will read it, no questions asked.”

This idolatry of Ocean Vuong is not unique, but is instead a distinct phenomenon that has emerged around Asian American artists today. Vuong contributes to the tradition also shared by Mitski and Japanese Breakfast, of a radical intimacy and self-disclosure in his art that fuels the cult of the artist. The emerging expectation that Asian American art should be both mentally healing as well as mentally destructive comes in tandem with the notion that art should be centered around self-disclosure.

That Asian American artists must offer an emotional service to the public is unique to their community: while it is true that all art has become more individualized in the 21st century, the demand placed on Asian American artists to soothe emotional turmoil aligns with their historical role in the economy, which has largely revolved around service jobs such as laundry, therapeutic, and nail salon work. The stereotype of Asian hospitality has fueled the implicit belief that Asian American art should require the artist to sacrifice a part of herself for the emotional catharsis of the consumer.

While Night Sky with Exit Wounds is just as intimate as Time is a Mother, the latter is much rougher around the edges, with an added vulgarity that at turns seems sincere and ironic. In his stream-of-consciousness poem “Dear Peter,” Vuong writes: “fuck he said / oh fuck you’re so much / like my little brother” and mentions a “…clinic window / where a girl / on methadone / claps alone / at a beige butterfly.” This is not to say that these topics are vulgar, but that they are almost puerile in their attempt to create a mature picture of adult life. Details such as these seem accessorial to the message of the poem, an act of self-conscious assertion that Vuong both knows and is capable of using profanity and profane images.

However, the type of language Vuong uses regularly in the collection is, whether intentionally or not, satirized by my favorite poem in the collection, “Old Glory.” In the poem, Vuong derides the famous sprezzatura of soldier lingo, which normalizes a vernacular of violence and misogyny. The poem features a series of short, ostensibly unrelated sentences, such as “A bombshell blonde. You’ll blow them away. Let’s bag the broad. Let’s spit-roast the faggot. Let’s fuck his brains out.” The casualness of these hackneyed phrases illuminates our internalized societal notions of dangerous femininity and the permissibility of casual acts of violence. The poem ends with the lines: “You truly murdered. You had me dying. Bro, for real though, we’re dead.” The searing ending of the poem demonstrates that this normalization of violence is a defensive response to the real violence in our society.

However, Vuong’s casualness does not point to any deeper reality, as he may have intended; instead, it leads to a void. That people felt that the collection “went over [their] head” isn’t a product of their literary amateurity, but instead of the real gaps that this collection demands its readers to fill through a detailed knowledge of the events of the author’s life. I struggled to find any meaning in the poetic form that Vuong used, which seemed not so much effortless as sloppy—not just in language, but also in his inclusion of the personal events from his life, from his relationship to his parents to Vietnam. It is frustrating because Vuong has brought much a much more intentional writing style to bear in his past publications—that this style was abandoned for a feigned indifference that is in vogue in modern poetry is unfortunate.

Compared to many of the poetry collections published today, Time is A Mother is still quite exquisite and heartfelt. Besides “Old Glory,” I particularly enjoyed “Snow Theory” and “Last Dinosaur” for their lyricism.

However, its wild success before its official publication portends a disturbing future in my eyes, in which a cult of the poet will result in the death of a poetic tradition which values, instead of challenges, the charms of anonymity. In a society where poets reach more fame than the poems they write, and consumers are emboldened to demand an increasing amount of knowledge into the artist’s psyche, I worry that we will confuse profundity with vulnerability, and lose the ability to appreciate artistic mystique.

Everything Ocean Vuong writes is mesmerizing. I hope I get an advanced copy of everything they write in the future because I hate waiting.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for giving me free access to the advanced copy of this book to read.

Critically acclaimed poet and MacArthur Fellow Ocean Vuong returns with a new body of work. He follows his award-winning collection, On Earth, We are Briefly Gorgeous with Time is a Mother.
Still processing the death of his mother, Vuong explores themes of personal loss, family, and feeling like an outsider in American society. Poems cover the immigrant experience, longing for the unavailable, and the death of his mother. How do you move forward when your creator, center, and protector is gone. How do you honor her?
One of the hardest poems in the collection to read for me was the Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker. Even the title makes such a sharp contrast with a person who is such a strong force in one's life and then reduced to a job and shopping activity. When the poem turns and covers cancer accessories (a scarf( and then ordering an urn) the sharpness takes your breath away.

An incredibly raw and moving colection of poetry. While I've read other reviews that said this one was less impactful than Vuong's previous collections, as a first time reader of his, I found it bothing moving, emotional, and very accesible.

A beautiful collection that, as with much of Vuong's work, explores emotions relating to his relationship with his mother. This second collection of poems speaks about grief, and while some of the poems felt like they could have been further excavated to get his message across more clearly, even the oblique lines jump from the page with a visceral emotion that is hard to look away from. Simply stunning.

Vuong’s writing focuses on mother/child relationship. So I was hesitant to read this. His novel hurt in ways I will always think of sentences and crumble a little. I wanted to pause on his language but I kept on thinking about what else he had to say.I wasn’t overwhelmed as I assumed I would be. I was nonetheless devastated, I’m seeing and thinking about how authors are dying to tell their stories, how vulnerable loving/losing feels. Access to a language so raw is the ultimate gift.

My favorite lines were:
“Forgetting I had no language. He kept breathing, to stay alive.”
“The dry outline of my mother/Promise me you won’t vanish again.”
“I feel sorry for anyone who has to die”
“I can make you look like something true”
“Childhood is only a cage that widens”
“If you see me then I prayed correctly.”
“My name a past tense where I left”
“Dear reader are you my mom, I can’t find her without you”
“How can any thing be found with just two hands?”

I'm an infamous poem-not-understander but I thought these were beautiful and mostly managed to hit me. "Not Even" and "Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker" is the definitive 1-2 punch of the collection for me. So much tenderness and great images here (love a garbage bag of anchovies).

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong. I read this over the last few days, and I finished by borrowing the audiobook because I thought - and I was correct - that hearing Vuong’s intended cadence and intonation would add richness to many of my favourite pieces. I’m now all the more excited to finish On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I’d describe Vuong as one of the best contemporary poetic storytellers. Audre Lorde has an essay in which she describes why Poetry is Not a Luxury, in this and her other works she explains how poetic communication has always come easier to her not due to a deficit in her understanding of traditional prose, rather, it is due to that format’s insufficiency in conveying the complexity of her own experience. You see exactly this in Vuong’s use of the poetic in both his poetry and prose to communicate his queer, immigrant, Vietnamese experience in America. The beautiful way he introduces us to his mother and family, he refuses to let us simplify her, demands that we look beyond the snapshot of a person it would be so easy to portray. You will, if you read or listen to this in its entirety, be comforted by how people, places, and experiences are offered in their entirety, rather than bite-sized reductions. You take it all or nothing at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This is the first Ocean Vuong book I've read. I've had On Earth on my TBR for months and when I saw this was available, I was excited to start here.

I absolutely adored this collection, It took me longer than anticipated to get through as I kept putting it down and returning as I needed to. I'm not sure if this is the most effective way of reading Vuong's work but it was such a delight to return to this book every week or so and engage with something new. I found myself scribbling notes all through this as I read it and highlighting liberally:

‘How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part.’

And from Dear Rose
"reader I plagiarised my life to give you the best of me"

I was completely taken with this and have just purchased Night Sky to start this evening. I would highly recommend this melancholic and emotive collection.

A stunning and honest collection of poetry that was prescient and comforting in this era of incredible loss.

I liked this a bit less than the previous collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I did still enjoy this quite a lot. Vuong does an amazing job at packing a tight punch into poetry that finds a way to hurt us, and yet, somehow, makes us feel more at home.

Beautiful, but just too dark for me. Highly recommended for libraries with a strong poetry following, or for fans of Vuong's other work.

Another moving exploration of grief, memory, sexuality, and identity that further demonstrates Vuong's command of language and form.

Full review posted at BookBrowse: https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/ref/pr285632

In "Time is a Mother", Vuong returns to subjects previously addressed throughout his oeuvre. In this collection he sidesteps any sort of repetitive pitfalls and brings a new perspective to recurring themes including grief, Vietnamese-American experience, family, intergenerational traumas, and the lingering effects of war. Writing in the wake of his mother’s death, Ocean wields a sharp personal voice while speaking to the universal experience of loss. Depending on the poem, the prose can be dense, narratively complex, and packed with nuance. I personally loved how there is a variety of forms used in these works too. As with any collection, some poems are stronger than others, but ultimately these are work that you can return to again and again. I also had the pleasure of attending a reading of these poems, and I found they gain new meaning when read aloud. Each time I re-read one myself, I notice new, intimate details that I may have overlooked before.