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

Stephen Schenkenberg

lindura

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

Lindsay

Nate

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

I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures.

Because what I did with my one short beautiful life— was lose it on a winning streak.

Sometimes I think gravity was like: To be brutally honest . . .

& then never stopped talking. I guess what I mean

is that I ate the apple not because the man lied

but that I wanted to fill myself with its hunger

for the ground, where the bones of my people

I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.

Time Is a Mother quotes

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