Going to self-plagerize a book review I wrote for a college class (sorry to whatever academic tribunal above):

Ocean Vuong excels in his refusal to shy away from the vulnerable and grotesque. Some of the most salient images throughout his second widely-released collection are those of fish spines dissolving in jars, the brush of shoulders amid a car crash, and bullets ripping into kin. Throughout his career, Vuong has never divorced love and affection from carnage and rot, he allows them to exist alongside each other much to the benefit of his storytelling.

In this collection, it’s clear Vuong is in a very different place in his life from where he was prior to the release of his explosively successful prose-poetry novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. In many ways, his poetry has matured and distilled, becoming curter and more biting. In other places, he plays with concepts that feel like they could be seeds of something, but weren’t pruned into complete thoughts. The trap of any writer with a cushion of success – however worthy – tends to be less ruthlessness from either the writer or their team. This can sometimes lead to more “spaghetti at the wall” making it to the presses.

That being said, I consider some of the poems within Time is A Mother to be career highlights from Vuong. Of particular note, the poem “Not Even” starts powerfully with “Hey./ I used to be a fag now I’m a checkbox” and spins downward in careening images of yuppie rooftop parties and stranger’s gentle hands on an Amtrak car and ends with an image of Vuong being birthed “wet and bloody … and enough.” This poem falls nearly directly in the middle of the collection, and feels like its emotional core as well.

Several poems explore versions of Vuong’s journey from Saigon to youth in working-class Hartford to NYU professor. “Künstlerroman” tells it in reverse, a Vuong stand-in sluicing back from mansion commendations to AOL chatrooms to finally slipping into the turned-over car that took four of his friends’ lives in high school. Künstlerroman translates loosely to the “artist’s novel,” moniker recognizable as a variant of a coming-of-age bildungsroman centering on the maturation of an artist.

Vuong is seemingly grappling with his own künstlerroman throughout this collection. We're reminded that those with complex, multi-layered trauma like Vuong are not suddenly divorced from their lived experience due to newfound economic or career stability. In the collection’s final poem, a sprawling epistolary addressed to his mother, he writes “stop writing/ about your mother they said/ but I can never take out/ the rose it blooms back as my own pink mouth how/ can I tell you this when you’re always to the right of meaning.”

Vuong, ever the weaver of contradictions, is tested in these pages. His meditations on his mother, on her death, on his past, on time like a rewinding tape you’re always trudging against, have his signature technical and emotional deftness. His struggles with feeling out of place amongst the WASPy art scene feel honest and studied, but the small moments of under-editing or almost laziness throughout feel like unintentional dramatic irony. 

While overall an impressive collection from a strong poet, I didn’t find it as consistently evocative as Vuong has demonstrated is within his wheelhouse. I do recommend it, but it wouldn’t be my first choice to introduce someone to Vuong. He is a poet I hold in such high regard, and thus hold high standards for. A writer writing about writing has been done many times and will continue to be fodder, but it takes an experimental and exceptional angle for it not to feel tired.