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Review | Ocean Vuong’s poetry – beautiful, piercing and precise – in Time is a Mother confronts a mosaic of suffering

  • Infused with hopeful yearning for a life of full­ness and joy, Vuong’s poems conjure dazzling imagery while resisting the simplicity of traditional verse
  • A minefield is a place ‘where you will learn/to dance’; his speaker ‘remembered my life/ the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree./& I was free’

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother, a new collection of poetry about overcoming loss - his most beautiful writing yet.

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong, pub. Penguin Press

In Not Even, the poem from which Ocean Vuong’s astonishing new book takes its title, he begs his body to be “more than what I’ll pass through”. He longs for a reality in which a protracted experience with loss (the death of his mother, the end of his relationship, the precarious condition of his mental health against the sting of such traumas) will yield a person who is not broken beyond repair – a person who like the poem tersely concludes, is

“screaming

and enough”.

The weight of that hopeful yearning permeates this piercing collection of poetry, resulting in the most beautiful work Vuong has given us to date.

Time is a Mother is a collection of meditations on piecing the self together after it has been ravaged by heartache and despair, two forces made an inevitable part of the human experience by time, which is unsparing.

Kevin Quinn is a teacher, writer and critic. He received his bachelor's degree in English from Yale University with a focus on the modern and contemporary novel and has written for Politico Magazine, thefeministwire.com and the forthcoming cultural quarterly Citizen. He has taught for many years in the United States and Hong Kong and is currently based in San Francisco.
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