In his second poetry collection, Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong meditates on grief as an emotion that is both a sacred act and a painful process. This tender and tragic collection explores similar themes from his debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: intergenerational trauma, belonging, masculinity, and queerness. This time, however, he writes through the lens of his late mother.
In unraveling the death of his mother, Rose, who died in 2019 of breast cancer, Vuong also unravels himself. As readers, we go there with him through 28 diverse poems as we traverse the myriad and complicated layers of grief. While each poem may not always imply it’s about his late mother, each stanza returns to her. In a recent Fresh Air interview, Vuong explains that ‘grief is the final act of love.’ An act that, he explains, never ends.
Time is a Mother turns inward, offering an intimate look at Vuong’s life as a Vietnamese immigrant and the associated intergenerational trauma, and grappling with his identity as an American. He also draws on the psychological trauma of the Vietnam War and his father's absence.
Much of Vuong’s poetry in the collection uses time as a muse to sit with death. The title implies such — the beginning is also the end. In writing Time is a Mother, Vuong has created a mutual space for the reader so they may understand his relationship to death while also understanding our own. So with deeply personal and raw prose, Vuong’s writing will once again break your heart and reveal its own truth.
