Time is a Mother

(Hardback)

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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 value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit. 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 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. Discover the powerful new collection from the TikTok sensation and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Reviews

These 28 accomplished poems explore grief, trauma, family... Language itself, in all its power and violence, falls under Vuong's incomparable scrutiny. * Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2022* *
A remarkable return: Vuong's unparalleled luminosity of phrase, his perfected pinpoint accuracy of image is here placed alongside a thrilling expansion of voice and gaze which further confirms Vuong as one of the most important poets of his generation. -- Andrew McMillan
Not since Emily Dickinson has poetry found such an oceanic openness of the self's quiet laceration and cautious resilience. In Time Is A Mother Ocean Vuong's words are bullets travelling through the page and hitting us with debris resembling our memory of art, love, grief and acts of survival... We find ourselves being salvaged and released into a world where a word, a turn of phrase, or a line makes a difficult moment bearable. There is a violent process of fermentation in Vuong's poems that keeps poetry pungent, truth-seeking and unerasable. -- Kit Fan
Ocean Vuong, one of my favourite contemporary poets, expanded his body of work beautifully in Time Is a Mother. * Observer *
Heartbreaking and perfect. * White Review, *Books of the Year* *

Author Bio

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.