Time is a Mother

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* *

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.