Source: Purchased
Hardcover, 128 pgs.
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Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong is a tumultuous collection of poetry in which the poetry is narrated by someone searching for love, acceptance, and a home. The collection opens with a surreal image of “The Bull,” in which the narrator calls himself a murderer of his own childhood. There is this sense that the narrator does not wish to grow up but has no choice but to become more mature. This signals to the reader that something has shifted in his world.
When the reader gets to “Snow Theory,” we see that a mother has vanished from the narrator’s life and he pleads: “What we’ll always have is something we lost/In the snow, the dry outline of my mother/Promise me you won’t vanish again, I said/She lay there awhile, thinking it over/One by one the houses turned off their lights/I lay down over her outline, to keep her true/Together we made an angel/” This is the moment where the journey begins and the poetic narrator is no longer anchored.
Throughout the collection, Vuong explores what it means to be loved and where love cannot be found. How a sense of belonging is integral to mental health and how the journey can nearly destroy you.
The image of snow appears throughout the collection, and it gives readers a sense of stillness, perhaps paralysis. It may be that the narrator is unable to fully move forward until they deal with the deep emotional loss of their mother, but it seems like the narrator is more adrift because they are unable to navigate the hatred he faces because of whom he loves.
There are a number of intriguing images throughout the collection, including the morgue as a community center, but some of these ideas are not fully fleshed out and leave the reader wandering in a surreal world without any breadcrumbs to follow. Perhaps this was intentional because like the narrator, the reader will feel adrift. Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong is a journey into the unknown.
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RATING: Tercet
About the Poet: