The parent-child relationship has been the nucleus of 33-year-old Ocean Vuong’s writing. The American poet’s family fled Vietnam to a refugee camp in the Philippines before migrating to the US. His father abandoned them. His mother worked in a nail salon. In one of the most compelling poems in his Forward prize-winning 2017 debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, he imagines dragging his father’s body out of the sea, turning him over, and seeing a gunshot wound in his back. His 2019 novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is a series of letters from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother — a tale that mirrors much of Vuong’s own life. Time Is a Mother is his second poetry collection, and was written in the aftermath of his mother’s death.
