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.
Time Is a Mother 2023 Shortlist
Judges’ Citation
Time Is a Mother is a breathtaking poetry book that rediscovers the voice of loss and the fragile layers of identity. Vuong’s writing is visceral, shaped like а relief map of unpredictable past and present.
Time Is a Mother is a breathtaking poetry book that rediscovers the voice of loss and the fragile layers of identity. Vuong’s writing is visceral, shaped like а relief map of unpredictable past and present. One of the most striking aspects of his poetry is the way in which he captures the passage of time, placing the seed of new worlds into time’s womb. He reflects on the ways in which memory becomes our body, and how the past can walk alongside us and open the doors of non-inherited grief and love. Time Is a Mother was written after the death of his mother — his silent muse and protector from the sharp edges of new borders and languages. He once said: ‘As a woman of color, an Asian woman, in the world, she taught me how to be vigilant. How people’s faces, posture, tone, could be read. She taught me how to make everything legible when language was not.’ Her death opened the window of eternal dialogue between them. Behind the shadows of loss, grief, and abandonment, his poetry reflects the strong echo of a ritualistic celebration of life and hope.
Selected poems
by Ocean Vuong
What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force
a bunch of ants to cross a white desert?
— Cousin Sara, Age 7
& if you follow these ants
they’ll lead you back to
stone tablets
an older desert
where black bones
once buried are
now words whereI wave to you
at 2:34 am they survived
the blast by becoming
shrapnel embedded in
my brain which
is called learning but maybe
I shouldn’t talk
like this maybe I should start
over Sara I messed up I’m
trying to stay clean but
my hands are monsters
who believe in
magic Sara the throat is also
an inkwell black
oil wrung through
your father’s fingers
after a day beneath
the Buick say
heartbreak & nothing
will shatter say Stonehenge
& watch the elephants sleep
like boulders blurred
in Serengeti rain it doesn’t
have to make sense to be
real—your aunt Rose gone
two years now like
a trick they forgot
to finish & the air holds
your voice as
it holds its own
vanishing maybe you
are the true soldier
ant hoarder of
what’s so massive
it could crush you into
a twitching
comma Sara
your name sharpens daily
against the marble
of your mother’s teeth there
are sparks in every
calling & called we press
our faces to the womb
till we’re jokes on
our way to cracking up & maybe
you’re right little ant
queen with your shoes
the shade of dirty
paper white desert
your pink & blue pens
untouched after all
who can stare at
so many ruins & call it
reading this family
of ants fossilized
on the page you slam
the book shut look out
at the leafless trees
doused in red April rain
where none of us
are children long enough
to love it
Copyright © 2022 by Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother, Penguin Books
Dear Sara
October leaves coming down, as if called.
Morning fog through the wildrye beyond the train tracks.
A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps.
That I woke at all & the hawk up there thought nothing of its wings.
That I snuck onto the page while the guards were shitfaced on codeine.
That I read my books by the light of riotfire.
That my best words came farthest from myself & it’s awesome.
That you can blow a man & your voice speaks through his voice.
Like Jonah through the whale.
Because a blade of brown rye, multiplied by thousands, makes a purple field.
Because this mess I made I made with love.
Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured.
Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.
Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.
Because I made a promise.
That the McDonald’s arch, glimpsed from the 2 am rehab window off Chestnut, was enough.
That mercy is small but the earth is smaller.
Summer rain hitting Peter’s bare shoulders.
The ptptptptptptpt of it.
Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.
Because this body is my last address.
Because right now, just before morning, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent.
Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn was unbearable.
Because the hills keep burning in California.
Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, a way out.
Because only music rhymes with music.
The words I’ve yet to use: timothy grass, jeffrey pine, celloing, cocksure, light-lusty, midnight-green, gentled, water-thin, lord (as verb), russet, pewter, lobotomy.
The night’s worth of dust on his upper lip.
Barnjoy on the cusp of winter.
The broken piano under a bridge in Windsor that sounds like footsteps when you play it.
The Sharpied sign outside the foreclosed house:
SEEKING CAT FRIEND. PLEASE KNOCK FOR KAYLA.
The train whistle heard through an opened window after a nightmare.
My mother, standing at the mirror, putting on blush before heading to chemo.
Sleeping in the back seat, leaving the town that broke me, whole.
Early snow falling from a clear, blushed sky.
As if called.
Copyright © 2022 by Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother, Penguin Books
Reasons for Staying
It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck
but so what. Like the wind, I ride
my own life. Neon light electric
in the wet part of roadkill
on the street where I cut my teeth
on the good sin. I want to
take care of our planet
because I need a beautiful
graveyard. It’s true I’m not a writer
but a faucet underwater. When the flood comes
I’ll raise my hand so they know
who to shoot. The sky flashes. The sea
yearns. I myself
am hell. Everyone’s here. Sometimes
I go to parties just to dangle my feet
out of high windows, among people.
This boy crying in his car
after his shift at McDonald’s
on Easter Sunday. The way
he wipes his eyes with his shirt
as the big trucks blare
off the interstate. My favorite
kind of darkness is the one
inside us, I want to tell him.
&: I like the way your apron
makes it look like you’re ready
for war. I too am ready for war.
Given another chance, I’d pick the life
where I play the piano
in a room with no roof. Broken keys, Bach
sonata like footsteps fast
down the stairs as
my father chases my mother
through New England’s endless
leaves. Maybe I saw a boy
in a black apron crying in a Nissan
the size of a monster’s coffin & knew
I could never be straight. Maybe,
like you, I was one of those people
who loves the world most
when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car
going nowhere.
Copyright © 2022 by Ocean Vu0ng, Time Is a Mother, Cape Poetry, and Penguin Press