Time is a Mother

Discover the powerful new collection from the TikTok sensation and author of On Earth We're Briefly GorgeousHow else do we return to ourselves but to foldThe page so it points to the good part'Tender and heartbreaking... Delving back into the visceral themes that made his 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous a revelation' TIMEIn 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. Vivid, brave and propulsive, Vuong's poems contend with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit.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. 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.'Further confirms Vuong as one of the most important poets of his generation' Andrew McMillan, author of Physical

Ocean Vuong, one of my favourite contemporary poets, expanded his body of work beautifully in Time Is a Mother., 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., These 28 accomplished poems explore grief, trauma, family... Language itself, in all its power and violence, falls under Vuong's incomparable scrutiny., 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., Vuong's...poems passionately and inventively articulate the difficulties of understanding and accepting selfhood alongside the varieties of life beyond it.

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 Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, and the New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.