Within this space, Vuong never shies away from direct references to pop culture. The narrative collision lasts for pages as Vuong shifts between “the sudden / wetness warm / everywhere, he slammed,” a kitchen table and his father “shitfaced on hennessy.” His poems begin in a singular moment, allowing Vuong to draw the reader into a separate suspended sequence of other times and places until the prose returns to that initial moment which, despite us having barely moved at all, is now imbued with memory and meaning. In the piece “American Legend,” Vuong describes himself and his father in a car crash.
Meditating on these haunting moments, Vuong transforms the laws of time and space in language that makes them both infinite and particular. Through writing about the lives and deaths of others, Vuong illustrates the strange feeling of having gone through a moment before, whether in a past life or in another timeline. In “Time is a Mother,” Vuong’s mother’s face becomes a “thumbprint left over,” a cremated pet, a puff “of smoke / little ghost / poodles.” The collection is filled with the ghosts of experience as Vuong attends to the relationship between absence and presence. Vuong’s voice is intricate but far from fragile as his attentive gaze turns to the magnitude of quotidian moments. Written after the death of Vuong’s mother in 2019, “Time is a Mother” parses through themes of grief and mourning, stillness and change, and the differences between interior and public personas. One of the most critically acclaimed contemporary poets, Vuong continues to explore the tenderness and weight of genre-bending writing in his work, particularly since the release of his debut novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” “I used to cry in a genre no one read,” Ocean Vuong writes in “Time is a Mother,” his most recent collection of poetry and prose.
0 kommentar(er)
