Time is a Mother

Ocean Vuong, one of my favourite contemporary poets, expanded his body of work beautifully in Time Is a Mother * Observer *Haunting, inconsolable, and at the same time a playful, generous in spirit, tender, inimitable book. The poet’s late mother is these pages’ muse and guardian spirit, as poem after poem Vuong redefines our idea of what an elegy can do it, what it is for. But from all of this intersection of tragedy and tenderness, true wisdom comes: Vuong teaches us not just how to grieve, but how to live – Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicA 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, author of PhysicalThis summer, I’ll be packing his poetry collection… I’m looking forward to being still and having the space to read and reread his powerful words – Dua LipaThese 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 the Year *Vuong’s poems passionately and inventively articulate the difficulties of understanding and accepting selfhood alongside the varieties of life beyond it * Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year *Tender and heartbreaking… Delving back into the visceral themes that made his 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous a revelation, Vuong traverses the intensely personal and the broadly political with grace and courage * TIME *There’s something about Vuong’s writing that demands all of your lungs. The succinct line arrangement and absence of full stops in poems * Observer *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, author of Diamond HillVuong writes with such a sensitive scrutiny, breathtaking in its expression * Financial Times, Books of the Year *

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City.