Time is a Mother

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Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

© Ocean Vuong 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

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 Republic
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, author of Physical
This 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 Lipa
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 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 Hill
Vuong writes with such a sensitive scrutiny, breathtaking in its expression
Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

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