Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong is defined by freshly surging lines — threads of life alchemized from upcycling the themes of love, loss, queerness, family, and the capability of language. And he pulls you in with lines as taut as rope, rhythms subtly trembling in a thoughtful desperation for the language to simply express. The settings are echoes of tragic pasts. The details are hardly overlooked. Time moves forward. In his sophomore full-length poetry collection Time Is a Mother, published by Penguin Random House, time finds itself looking into a mirror.

The women in Vuong’s narrator’s life (whether it is Vuong writing about life appears blurred) have frequently assumed center stage in his writing. He wrote Time Is a Mother after the loss of his mother Lê Kim Hồng (whose name means “Rose” or “pink” in Vietnamese) at 51 due to breast cancer in November 2019. Though Hồng understands little English, she would come to his poetry readings and turn her chair to face the audience to see the impact of her son’s poetry. Her loss inspired Vuong to liberate himself from what he perceived to be her expectations. “I’ve had regrets for every page of all the other books,” he told the Wall Street Journal Magazine in an interview, “but this one, I feel really complete with it.”

We are presented with mass-produced copies of his poems, often regarded as the finalized versions. We cannot immediately see what he may have erased or crossed out or what may have escaped his mind, but the inerasable fact is that what was excluded and forgotten still lives within time. Time, with our past actions and thoughts, is willfully irreversible. Ocean Vuong cannot go back.

“Nothing” slides seamlessly in and out of the past and the present. Vuong is shoveling snow with his boyfriend Peter, who is also the subject of this collection’s “Dear Peter” and “Devotion” from his debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In “Nothing,” object and place shift between the uncontrollable influences of memory and history. A bread recipe and Florence, Massachusetts conjure Peter’s grandmother’s experiences as a Jewish woman during World War Two. Near the end, snow falls again “as though nothing happened,” but the poet determines and repeats “something must come out of this.”

Fans of Vuong’s previous works will once again experience the soft timbres of his voice filling up the somehow delicate and cutting Garamond on the page, ever weary of the white space where editorial omissions and the bewilderingly inexpressible thoughts lie. The experience of reading Vuong baffles the senses.

“Dear T” expresses the act of writing as a magical, messy experience. Vuong is constantly grappling with “how you say what you mean changes what you say.” In an attempt to control time, he puts his belief in artistic precision: “let me spell out / these m-a-p-l-e-s just right / so we’ll have a few more seconds.” And if he can control the feeling, could he control time?

The following lines appear to say no:

the aubade

left to rot into afternoon

when every word

was forgotten as soon as the hand moved

across the page away

He answers that question more explicitly in a later poem “Ars Poetica as the Maker,” where the narrator metaphorically writes a poem out of “ash, dark as ink”: “& I was done. / & it was human.” And if he cannot control even the words his own hand creates, what is it he was put on the earth for?

Vuong also embraces an offbeat, humorous New York School style of poetry. He cites humor as a mechanism that has historically and continually allowed the marginalized to endure trauma. Here, some of his poems lean more towards prose than his usual lyricism. Despite the difference, they rival the other poems in memorability.

“The Last Prom Queen of Antarctica” is bright, beautiful, and lonely. It also supplies the collection with one of its most exquisitely sad lines: “I was one of those people / who loves the world most / when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car / going nowhere.” “Beautiful Short Loser” is humorous in both name and content. “Stand back, I’m a loser on a winning streak,” he writes, presumably high or somewhat delirious when a police officer pulls him over and interrogates him. Even in humorous settings, he retains deeply melancholic notes. 

The poet’s debut novel — written as a poetic letter to an illiterate mother from the perspective of a man who is a product of the Vietnam War — found itself debuting on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction best sellers list at number 6. His mainstream popularity has made him high in demand for interviews and speaking engagements. The public’s obsession with the personal and poetry’s personal nature may have resulted in an unfortunate oversaturation of his ideas. Any follower of the poet can hear how Vuong “needed language,” how the world he grew up in “lacked the cohesion” to write an unfragmented novel, how he could “never write a memoir” because he simply is not brave enough.

In On Earth, the poet asks, “But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?” He concludes this brief ponderance with, “‘Good for you man,’ a man once told me at a party, ‘you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.’” In a television interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host brings up this passage, and Vuong laments how violent language has become a measure of success, contributing to “a masculinity that is toxic.”

This is breathtaking and profound when heard the first few times. Our everyday vernacular, sliding right through our bodies and slipping out of our mouths, brings to mind the violence of the past and present and nurses more of it. In one of the poems in Time Is a Mother “Old Glory,” Vuong appears to pick up where he left off in similar pithy sentences.

A reader and fan of On Earth, Aissata Barry ’22, felt some of the poems like “Nothing” and “Reasons for Staying” preserved a classic “heart jab” that long-time fans could easily find in his previous works. However, Barry said, “The book wasn’t the fresh breath of air I wanted it to be.” This repetition of themes risks what most writers fear — the text becoming repetitive. While it would be plainly incorrect to say that universally enduring themes cannot be reused, the artist must take caution. Redundant or a reminder? With Vuong, it is hard to tell.

Among his more innovative poems, Vuong takes on the künstlerroman, a story that depicts the development of a young artist, with his own (titular) poem. In On Earth, he is no stranger to the bildungsroman, a story that focuses on the development of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood, and subverting it. He redefines what a man’s road to maturity and masculinity looks like as the narrator sports his mother’s dresses and comes out to his mom as gay.

“Künstlerroman” remembers the story of a famed writer, possibly Vuong himself, through a dizzying movie rewind. It reads, “He walks backwards — though there’s so little time left to destroy.” The images, at times, present themselves in perfect acuity. At others, the pixelations from film disintegrate from place to place, action to action, beautiful and uneasy, as if representing memory’s frailties.

In “Dear Rose,” he begins, “Let me begin again” — a line he has used twice in On Earth (once at the very beginning and another toward the end of the book). As he revisits this concept of writing a letter to his illiterate mother, he is coming back a little more certain of what he knows. He tells Hồng “our present tense was not too late” with resolve. While time moves forward, “the linear fish-spine dissolved by time at last” is bottled. But it moves nonetheless. It is not stuck.

We are presented with mass-produced copies of his poems, often regarded as the finalized versions. We cannot immediately see what he may have erased or crossed out or what may have escaped his mind, but the inerasable fact is that what was excluded and forgotten still lives within time. Time, with our past actions and thoughts, is willfully irreversible. Ocean Vuong cannot go back.