![]() Time Is a Mother is published by Jonathan Cape. I didn’tĮnough to hold, I reached for him. The green-blue lamp swirled in its socket. & like all murderers, my godīy a man with no mouth. What do you want? I asked, forgetting I had no language. He stood alone in the backyard, so dark the night purpled around him. You may well hear them again in the future, but because Vuong plays with time by the millisecond - slowing down or speeding up old memories or conversations - he uncovers new enlightening details that have a life of their own. You may have heard these stories about Vuong’s life, his family history, and the tragedies of his people who lay “mangled under the Time photographer’s shadow” before. Rose, I whispered as they zipped my mother in her body bag, get out of there. Absurdity is in abundance in this poem, but it’s the way Vuong uses comedic timing that surprisingly provides the most arresting and evocative moment: He fills the poem with pregnant pauses, sometimes suffixing phrases with “Ha” to inspire awkward laughter. Sentences such as “Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth”, feel like one liners. Not Even is packed with laconic matter-of-fact sentences that blast. “I was made to die but I’m here to stay”, he asserts in The Last Dinosaur. These ghost poems are about the cavernous corners of loss, grief, abandonment, trauma and war, but that doesn’t result in nihilism or apathy for life in fact, Vuong approaches death like an entrance rather than an ending. Still, underneath the macabre scenes is an innocent curiosity and thirst for truth and beauty. Here, we see the lengths one might go to for intimacy, as a son crashes his car to get physically closer to his father. Poems like American Legend reveal the heights of Vuong’s self-destruction. But it’s the candid, unphotogenic angles with bad lighting that are the most memorable, as in Rise & Shine, where he touches on drug addiction. Some of the moments feel like stock images playing air guitar in a backwards wedding dress as seen in Beautiful Short Loser, or hitting “rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere”, in The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica. Vuong, to varying degrees, illustrates what it means to be out of control. The narrator of the poem is bewitched by the bull’s beauty its kerosene-blue eyes and fur so dark it purples the night around it. The painterly opener, The Bull, sets the tone for this sense of wild abandon. ![]() He also wonders if she’s still illiterate:īeing led by urge and compulsion feels central to the emotional landscape of Time Is a Mother, sometimes to the point of recklessness. He fills the poem with vivid imagery: flying bullets, corpses, Wonder Bread dipped in condensed milk and the fermentation of fish. The succinct line arrangement and absence of full stops in poems such as Dear Rose force you to breathe heavy, as throughout this episodic poem Vuong talks tenderly to his dead mother about her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to the US. There’s something about Vuong’s writing that demands all of your lungs.
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