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Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother, Penguin Random House, 2022. 112 pgs.
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Building a foundation on the aftershocks of his mother’s death, this collection of Ocean Vuong further explores, but also transcends the boundaries of his poetic language that first appeared in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, his first poetry collection. He shifts through memory, and how it intersects the present. Dealing with personal loss, Vuong discovers the value of joy in a fractured spirit of race, living in America and his Vietnamese heritage of violence (people who lay “mangled under the Time photographer’s shadow”). Time is a mother of sorts—of memory (even those not his own), and as an influencer of current actions—Time is something that sits on our shoulders, whispering to us.
The first poem in the collection, “The Bull”, sets the tone as one of wild abandon. The narrator is bewitched by the bull’s beauty; its kerosene-blue eyes and fur so dark it purples the night around it. “I had no choice. I opened the door.” That is to memory, the past and its intersection with the present. The poet is a boy, a “murderer of childhood. & like all murderers, my god was stillness”. By reaching “not the bull—but the depths”, he gets a hint about how he can write about memory: it’s “not an answer but an entrance in the shape of an animal”.
This hints on the form and shape of his poems. In trying to find restoration in terms of both peace and violence, the two reconcile in fragmentary forms. This peace and violence and restoration lead to poetic structure where this structure is integral to meaning. Line breaks in most of the poems mean some of them run back and forth over the page as in “Dear T”, a poem addressed to a past lover, detailing the joy of the relationship, the sadness that a death through illness brings and memories of both. “Nothing” is a dense block of text, a page and a half, reflecting on the past trauma of a roommate: “It’s warm in this house where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room then”, perhaps indicating they have survived this trauma. But by saying “it’s nothing” about a small act one performs for the other at the end of the poem, we know it’s not, but will remain in the (memory) room with them.
“Beautiful Short Loser” is a series of questions and dislocated standalone statements, showing a mind confused. Being “on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, their futures”, his despair is obvious, because he cannot make sense of it all. In “Rise & Shine”, where he touches on drug addiction, he writes: “Scraped the last $8.48 from the glass jar. /Your day’s worth of tips at the nail salon. /Enough for one hit.”
“Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker”—A poignant list over the course of more than a year of the poet’s mother’s life—the change in her online orders to Amazon reflecting the advance of his mother’s cancer and ultimate death. It is emotional in its simple matter-of-factness.
Vuong plays with time—slowing down or speeding up old memories or conversations inserting them into the present—he uncovers new details missed in earlier days. He goes in reverse to do this. “Künstlerroman” is a seven-page narrative where time moves backwards: “After walking forever through it all, I make it to the end. / The REWIND button flashes red_red_red”, the poem begins. The poet watches as a man rises and walks backwards, and “keeps running backward through the narrative—that is, the knowledge—I’ve forced on him”, he writes till he “the man” becomes the boy again—living in the memory.
“Dear Rose” (his mother’s name in English); penultimate poem in the anthology, the poet talks lovingly to his dead mother about her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to the US. The short line arrangement and absence of full stops in poems force us to breathlessness as the son tells the story of his mother in a series of episodes.
My arms dim as incomplete
Sentences reader I’ve
plagiarised my life
to give you the best
of me & these words these
insects anchovies
bullets salvage & exiled
by art Ma my art these
corpses I lay
side by side on
the page to tell you
our present tense
was not too late
So, the poem ends, seemingly to be continued, just as time will do.
The poems in Time is A Mother demand multiple readings. I rationed myself to reading one poem a day from the collection to glean the full meaning of these poems. As I write this, I am discovering even more meaning. Other poets should weep at the skill of Ocean Vuong.
How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. “I’ve Plagiarised My Life to Give You the Best of Me: Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 27 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/27/mother.
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Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]