Enjoyed but not for me (3/5 stars)

I have not been one to read much poetry, however, I was looking forward to Ocean Vuong's newest poetry collection as I had heard endless praise for his past work. This collection was a beautiful depiction of grief and recovery. I unfortunately felt like most of this went over my head. For those who love reading insightful collections of poetry, this is a perfect book for you. This was not for me but I will most defiantly give his other work as try.

3.5/5 stars

My reaction: Maybe this one just wasn't for me.

I was excited to dive into this poetry collection. Admittedly, I wanted to see what all of the hype building was all about and after reading a description, it seemed interesting enough. One thing you will get from Vuong is vulnerability and an openness that will grab you as you begin to tap into his story. It is a deeply personal story about depression, grief, and loss. WHEW!

There were several pieces that resonated with me, especially "Not Even" and "Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker". The latter of the two is so personally touching to me as Vuong speaks of his mother's battle with cancer and her later passing. The topics pursued were real and heartfelt. There was a so much emotion packed into this collection.

I rated this collection 3.5/5 stars because more often than not Vuong's writing felt too abstract and vague for me to follow. I think Vuong tells a great story, it's just that I was sometimes lost in the delivery and struggled with messaging. There's deep and there's too deep and unnecessarily complex.

Nevertheless, poetry, again is a personal thing so I think it's one you'll have to read on your own and make your own conclusions about. I hope you find this review helpful!

“How come the past tense is always longer?” // Ocean Vuong

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This poetry collection came out yesterday and is bursting with beauty and depth and run-on-sentences. An absolute stunner. This was one of my most anticipated 2022 reads and it did not disappoint. A few more favorite lines because I couldn’t choose just one:

“I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.”

“It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire.”

“Because only music rhymes with music.”

Thanks to @netgalley and @penguinprese for an advanced e-copy!

Those of us who have read Vuong's previous works will be familiar with his mother, and she died of cancer in 2019. So some of these poems deal with grief, also recovery, rural realities, family (including members of his partner Peter), and more. I listened to the audio of the poet reading them while reading the eARC and Ocean is a very small statured person with a quiet voice, but it's deceptive because his words always pack a punch. I also feel like he sees into the reality of people and circumstances past the facade. He isn't like anyone else, that's for sure.
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Happy National Poetry Month! This collection comes out April 5.

This collection of poems delves deep into Vuong's experiences of grief, and pain. It follows the author’s life after his mother’s death. The discussions of living with grief, while also wanting to move past that to live a functional life were heartfelt and simply relatable. He shows you thru his words that the saying 'Time heals' is almost always incorrect for most people. I always love when an author can be so deeply open in their work and I could feel Vuong's emotions emerging from the words.

This collection makes you fall in love with lines. Poems like these deserve to be reflected on and reread again and again. Now, I believe that you shouldn’t read this book in one sitting because it’s best experienced by taking each poem in slowly and just closing the book and reflecting on each word.

This book certainly made me cry. Muliple times. I loved it so much and I know that in the next few days, I will definitely go through the book and reread some poems.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

Ocean Vuong's poetry is moving and beautiful, as always. I was a massive fan of his last collection, and with this one he has solidified himself to me as a talent to follow. The way he navigates grief, identity, and love is nothing short of breathtaking. In that way, this collection was especially cathartic for me. Vuong finds the words for emotions we all often feel, but sometimes are unequipped to convey. A collection that feels like a shot to the heart, as well as a comforting hand to hold.

Ocean Vuong is an incredibly compelling and thoughtful writer. His stories are raw and complex and they never fail to touch the deepest parts of my soul. This collection of poems was not an exception. This author is truly one of the best in the genre. I look forward to seeing Time is a Mother on our shelves.

I am by no means a poetry expert, but this collection was shattering. I was in awe of Vuong’s visceral descriptions and ability to move through time. As a reader, I stood at the edge of a story, peering into someone’s life through small revelations with large impacts. The discussions of grief were hard hitting and relatable to anyone who has experienced a personal loss.
At first I found it hard to digest certain lines and make sense of the words, and of course that is fault of my own limited experience understanding poetry and lyrical writing, but as I kept reading, the real subjects emerged from the lines so clear and personal. Lines I had to reread just to ponder, lines I had to reread just to admire, lines I couldn’t bare to reread to protect my heart. I highlighted so many passages to return to and to me that makes a book memorable and affecting.
This book touches on so much— grief, generational trauma, queerness, gender, family, Asian experiences, war…. I could go on forever.

I’ll end on one of my favorite quotes to inspire everyone to pick this up:

“Inside my head, the war is everywhere. I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures.”

Vuong’s second book of poetry deals with the way the passage of time impacts relationships between people. Both sad and happy, violent and gentle, his poems reflect such experiences as shoveling snow with a loved one in “Nothing”. He draws on his own experiences, but the themes explored are universal.

Ocean Vuong is an incredible poet and overall writer. As usual, this collection flowed beautifully and managed to circumvent traditional writing styles without feeling inaccessible. A true master of the written word.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for sending me this ARC in exchange of an honest review.

I cannot express the admiration and respect I have for Ocean. I quickly fell in love with his work after reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I admire his way with words, his eloquence, and intelligence. I find so much comfort in his art (maybe because of our shared SEA background, maybe because he reminds me of the safe space and a mentor I once had), but most of all, I admire the way he transforms the world and lived experiences into words that transcends pages in a book.

That said, I'm so sad to say that this collection of poetry wasn't for me. It wasn't you, Ocean. It was me. I'm simply too dense for poetry in any capacity and I naively thought the words in this book could ever carry the same weight for me it does you.

To put it frankly, it took me over 1.5 months to get through this 130 page collection and I didn't understand a single thing.

Time Is a Mother comes out April 5th. I hope it resonates with you more than it did me.

(3.5 stars)
I have a hard time typically reviewing poetry because it’s much more difficult to place judgements on such raw words, and Ocean Vuong’s work is exactly that. I was surprised that for such a popular, almost mainstream poet that Vuong’s poems are not exactly accessible to unfamiliar poetry readers; but when you really linger with the poems it can be really rewarding and profound. I’m sure this will improve in my opinion with time as poetry can be overwhelming on first brush and Ocean Vuong doesn’t hold back with the punches. Overall a really intriguing collection and highly recommended for those interested in incisive writing with a really distinct authorial voice.

“Because the hills keep burning in California.
Through red smoke, singing. Though the singing, a
way out.
Because only music rhymes with music.”

This is a book about sons, mothers, and ghosts. While it is intertwined with queerness and race and American imperialism, in the end it all comes back to Ocean Vuong and his late mother.

I read my first poem from Vuong a couple years ago in a college class on poetry. It was confusing at the time and, I will admit, some of his poems are still a bit difficult for me to grasp. But the vast majority are so evocative, even if I had to reread them a couple times to understand what was going on.

Here is an abridged list of my favorite poems from this collection:
- Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker
- Künstlerroman
- The Punctum
- Beautiful Short Loser
- You Guys

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

“how can i say the hole
in your brother’s back is not
a part of your brother but your brother
aparted who is still somewhere
running because i wrote it
in the present tense”

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4403695861Ocean Vuong never misses!! This collection was surprising, heartbreaking, and relatable. He didn't waste a single word. These poems focus on the power of language, loss, and queerness. I can definitely always tell that he is smarter than me (lol) so I don't understand every poem or metaphor fully, but I can easily see that they're always created with intention, and I like the challenge of spending more time on these poems to understand what that is.

I've been a fan of Ocean Vuong's work since reading his collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds back when it debuted. His writing is often stark and gutting but beautiful, and after reading this collection, I still find myself turning over many of the poems in my mind.

But, you do have to work for it. This isn't a poetry collection that's easily accessible. I don't believe that's a bad thing, but if you're looking for a light book of poems to breeze through — this is not that. He deftly covers topics like grief and death, his experience as a refugee, generational trauma and identity. Each stanza, sometimes each line, leaves the reader with something else to unwrap.

I make it a practice to read poetry regularly. And yet, many of these poems felt out of my reach. I read some of them two or three times and still had a difficult time understanding what they meant. I know this won't be the case for everyone, but it was my experience.

There are several poems in the collection that I considered to be real stand-outs. "Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker" and "Kunstlerroman" were both brilliant. I even wrote "This is how you write a prose poem" in the margins of the latter. I can imagine myself coming back to these poems and several others in the months to come.

Time is a Mother is a short collection and can easily be read in a single sitting, but I'd recommend taking your time with it. Read a poem or two before bed or first thing in the morning and let it soak through your consciousness.

I'm averaging this book as a 4-star read, with:
- 5 stars for craft
- 3 stars for my personal reaction to it

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for the honor of reading and reviewing this book.

Ocean Vuong is a master of language. I absolutely loved his other published books; this is another book I now treasure. In this poetry collection, we follow Ocean, exploring the aftermath of his mother's death with him as he takes side roads in revisiting memories about his mother, and his experiences dealing with race and sexuality. Throughout all his poems, you can feel his grief. It is haunting, beautiful, and sad. There were a few poems from this collection that now live in my memory. I can't wait to purchase this book for my book collection.

Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin Press, for providing me an advanced reader copy of this book!

4/5

Ocean Vuong is an expert at wresting poetry from each high-wrung emotion that completes the spine of Time is a Mother—as always, I’m blown away by the incredible emotive force behind his words. Each letter needles in on the atomic level, with no word aimed haphazardly.

That being said, I wasn’t won over with the same submerging power of Vuong’s previous works: for me, Time is a Mother felt like a far less cohesive body of work than Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and, though experimenting with more proselike formats throughout certain poems, was insufficient in wholeness to elicit the eviscerating response that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous did. While there were moments of suffocating, visceral clarity (“Dear Rose” comes to mind) as well as captivating candor, some works felt slightly off-kilter to the themes that the collection is marketed as. At times straightforwardly beautiful and at other times ruminatively complex, it’s difficult to lay a single finger on Vuong’s poetic prowess.

It’s oftentimes hard to think critically about poetry, though, so we must think with our hearts: for me, Vuong is no less incandescent, but feels perhaps like he’s penning down an apparition rather than a full-bodied muse. Motifs of grief, memory, and gold shoot through the book like dark veins against pale paper, yet Vuong’s relinquishing of some of his measured control has lowered their opacity.

Holistically though, it’s a great read. It’s excruciating to spend time savoring each poem when Vuong’s alluring gravity is so all-encompassing; I burned through the 27 poems with fervor. It’s the type of book you reread over and over again to find new gilded moments of wonder in every time you pick it up, even with its rifts and faultlines.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press for providing a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I do not often read poetry, but, Vuong's words are chilling and gripping. They come alive on every single page. And while the cadence may not be what many poetry readers are used to, the themes of grief and identity are universal and hard-hitting. It was a pleasure to read Time Is a Mother, as is always the case with Vuong's books.

I have not read “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” but I kept hearing about how amazing it is and how Vuong’s prose sounded like poetry so I was very excited to get an ARC Vuong’s collection of actual poetry. I was sure this was going to be amazing. I was wrong. I’m not an avid poetry reader, but I can recognize the difference between good poetry and Instagram poetry. Sadly, this is neither. Poem after poem I found myself wondering what I was actually reading, what the meaning of it was, what did it have to do with the title of the poem. There was no sense of rhythm, line breaks that made no sense (even worse than Rupi Kaur), metaphors that left me scratching my head, and just a jumble of words that move from one disparate thought to another. There was one poem that I liked so I did give half a star for that however, I thought this was a mess of poems and has turned me off from trying to read his novel.

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of “Time is A Mother” in exchange for an honest review. I really enjoyed this collection of poetry. I have not read any of Vuong’s work previously and will do so after reading “Time is a Mother.” I thought that the poems were deeply moving and well-crafted. Thank you for the opportunity to read this.