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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2022, 128 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2023, 128 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Callum McLaughlin
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The highly anticipated 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.
I
Snow Theory
This is the best day ever
I haven't killed a thing since 2006
The darkness out there, wet as a newborn
I dog-eared the book & immediately
Thought of masturbation
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part
Another country burning on TV
What we'll always have is something we lost
In the snow, the dry outline of my mother
Promise me you won't vanish again, I said
She lay there awhile, thinking it over
One by one the houses turned off their lights
I lay down over her outline, to keep her true
Together we made an angel
It looked like something being destroyed in a blizzard
I haven't killed a thing since
Many of the poems flow freely, featuring unexpected line breaks and little in the way of punctuation. This lends them an almost breathless quality, as though thoughts and emotions are spilling forth unchecked — apt given the raw emotion at hand. With his remarkable command of the form, Vuong invites readers to pause, contemplate and see themselves and their own experiences reflected in the text. The poems are deeply personal, but their themes — including family, grief and selfhood — are universally resonant...continued
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(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Language and communication are key themes throughout the work of Ocean Vuong. In both his fiction and poetry — including his newest collection, Time Is a Mother — he discusses the difficulties his mother faced as a Vietnamese immigrant living in the U.S. who didn't read, write or speak English.
Historically, being a melting pot of people from around the world, the U.S. was a polyglot nation, with the use of multiple indigenous and immigrant languages accepted as the norm. Historical studies on this subject suggest that at the time of independence, the first language of a third or more of American residents was something other than English.
The arrival of World War I in 1914 significantly curtailed immigration to the U.S.,...
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