Ocean  Vuong

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.

Time Is a Mother

Essence

I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.

That it's fair—it has to be-how our hands hurt us, then give us

the world. How you can love the world until there's nothing left to love

to survive-which means you are somebody's son.

Which means if you open your eyes, you'll be back in

that house, under a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.

…Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.

But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked for and choose a place where your wanting ends-which part of war do we owe this knowledge?

In my language… the word for love is Yêu.

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.

I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.

To be a dam for damage. My shittyness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.

Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.

Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it.

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air-and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.

none of us are children long enough to love it

Sandra Zhang

How you can love the world until there's nothing left to love but yourself. Then you can stop.

Because I stopped apologizing into visibility. 

lindura

Is the memory of a song the shadow of a sound or is that too much?

Luna 🌙

Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life

the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.

Lindsay

Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold. 

Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

My favorite kind of darkness is the one inside us

It’s true I’m not a writer but a faucet underwater.

the Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker WRECKED ME 

Rocío de la Hera

Ghofran Mustafa 

I’m not sad , he told me once, laughing,
I’m just always here..

Kiran Aftab

yousr abu sboulah

“I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.”

"reader, i've plagiarised my life to give you the best of me" 

mum i love you i wish i was everything you wanted.

iris 

"reader, i've plagiarised my life to give you the best of me" 

mum i love you i wish i was everything you wanted.

the structuring on the pages.. it’s obviously there on purpose. it was written with intention. and there are multiple things that stood out to me, but i didn’t quite understand it.  i still loved it n i wish i was articulate enough to be able to word exactly what i want to say. but the point is, i enjoyed it. id read it over and over again until understanding even if i never can.

carla t ho

laetitia

this collection felt so uninhibited & freeing & honest. genius as always, pulsing w so many layers of aliveness. so so different from night sky (even on earth) & yet feels so logical for vuong to have arrived at these poems/this collection x

as always, ocean vuong will strike your heart unbeknownst to you and manage to pull heartstrings you didn’t know existed and then crumple it up and straighten it again 

tine

as always, ocean vuong will strike your heart unbeknownst to you and manage to pull heartstrings you didn’t know existed and then crumple it up and straighten it again 



azliana aziz

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 epicentre 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.

Time is a Mother

Bulkan Evcimen

With most of the poems, I struggled to work out what it was about. Perhaps the metaphors was beyond me and perhaps that is my fault rather than the authors. 

Reading through Nothing and Künstlerroman was such a chore and struggle. 

Overall, there are a few sections out of various poems that I really enjoyed and my favourites are;

- I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard (from The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica)

- you named me after a body of water ‘cause it’s the largest thing you knew after god (from Dear Rose)

Emily Perkovich

This had a few pieces in it that felt…displaced? With the rest of the collection, but that may just be me, and they didn’t take away from the experience for me at all.

kim♡

”I didn’t know god saw in us a failed attempt at heaven. Didn’t know my eyes had three shades of white but only one image of my mother.”

Linnéa Löfström

min instagram story har nog sett halva boken - vilket tyder på att den är helt fantastisk

brianna

sadly did not enjoy as much as night sky with exit wounds

lea da silva

time & grief are terrifying. time is a mother captured that. something that can’t be explained, but is felt day by day. ocean vuong, i cannot thank you enough for saying the words that choked me so often in this life

Shona Tiger

i started reading this while i was at school and i dont know what gave me the idea because i literally had to stop multiple times in shook with my hand over my mouth to hold back a "oh shit" because thats just how powerful vuong is with words. silently blowing my mind away while i was surrounded by people and supposed to be finishing my math homework. 

jude

Ivy X

3.5

 Quotes  

- Tell me this, how come the past tense is always longer?
Is the memory of a song the shadow of a sound or is that too much? 

- I'm not high, officer, I just don't believe in time. 

-That I recall every follicle in the failure the way they'll remember god after religion: alone, impossible, & good. 

-I didn't know god saw in us a failed attempt at heaven. Didn't know my eyes had three shades of white but only one image of my mother. She's standing under an ancient redwood, sad that her time on earth is all she owns. 

-When the flood comes I'll raise my hand so tey know who to shoot. The sky flashes. The sea yearns. I myself am hell. 

-maybe I can build a boy 

out of the silences inside maybe 
we can cease without dying fuck 
without tears falling 

-Once at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn for an "artsy vibe," a young woman said, sipping her drink,  You're so lucky. You're gay plus you get to write about war and stuff. I'm just white.  [Pause]  I got nothing.  [Laughter, glasses clinking]

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold. 

Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow. 

Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. 

- It's been proven difficult to dance to machine-gun fire. 
Still, my people made a rhythm this way. A way.
My people, so still, in the photographs, as corpses. 
My failure was that I got used to it. I looked at us, mangled under the  Time  photographer's shadow, and stopped thinking,  get up, get up  

-Time is a mother.
Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.
In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yeu.
And the word for weakness is Yeu. 
How you say what you mean changes what you say. 
Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.

-I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white weather

-Because this body is my last address.

This book contains my favourite poem ever <3

Lorelei Petcu

i wasn't in the best place to be reading this and man, it was raw and forced me to come to terms with a lot of my issues. i think i need to see a therapist

kate humphreys 

there are individuals who have such a power over words that i can’t help but sit and marvel at what they’re able to create by simply stringing a sentence together in a way no one ever has, in a way that has such profound meaning - vuong is inarguably one of these people

Time Is a Mother

Reviews

Highlights