Ever since reading Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in 2019, I’ve searched the world of podcasts, articles, and frankly every corner of the internet to learn more about the soul behind the breathtaking, genre-bending work. It’s the book I recommend to anyone when they ask what they should read next.

So when I saw that he was passing through Nashville to promote his new book two weeks before I would be moving to LA, I jumped at the chance—but the tickets had sold out in a matter of minutes. I deleted the hopeful save the date in my calendar, making a quiet, external peace with it not happening—yet secretly holding out for a surprising turn of events.

The morning before the reading, a friend with impressive bookstore connections texted that two tickets had miraculously become available. I shouted the news from the bathroom to my husband who was luckily on his computer, and we scored the tickets. The universe had generously given what I had hoped would be a reality I got to live in—the one where we get to be in the room listening to one of my favorite living poets read his own words.

Ocean’s mother died in 2019, shortly after the release of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. While he’s spoken about their connection during interviews and his novel reads as almost-autobiographical, he’s careful to distance real life from the characters in his work. But what he distances in facts he leans closer to in themes, which in this new collection is the tenderness and tragedy of time. Depending on what angle you’re reading it from, Time Is A Mother is both nurturing and brutal (i.e. “time is a motherf*cker” is an actual line in his book).

He walks up to the stage in shiny platform loafers, a solo earring in his ear. There’s some mic trouble at the start (as there often is at these sorts of things), and the room is instantly endeared. He begins with the poem “Not Even”, and the powerful, quivering nature of his voice is a sound I’m grateful to have experienced in my lifetime. He explores the inextricable link between identity and history and how losing his mother has made him feel more connected to everyone else. To him, this primary loss is the Great Equalizer. While he mentions he’s not interested in obsessing over the “universal” (in contast to being as specific as possible as to honor the wide range of diversity that’s been underrepresented in the past), he’s found his way into the heart of things nonetheless.

I finished Time Is A Mother this morning in my upstairs writing room, amidst a cluster of half-packed boxes. I’m still letting it settle inside me, much like sand slowly sinks back to the ocean’s floor after stirring. In Ocean’s way of seeing, everything belongs—the language he uses builds a world in which everything is held, soft, brutal, gentle, given, and taken all at once. I can’t stop thinking about how, if we let it, grief expands us. What we’re leaving, or what has left us, still stays somehow.

In hopes that you might pick up a copy for yourself, I’ll leave you with the last lines from “Not Even”, the poem that helped me touch my own ocean floor again. I feel the pull to keep my heart open to the heartbreaking wonder of being alive, where as Ocean put it, “our present tense is not too late”:

“I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white weather and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, into the world, screaming and enough.”

What We're Reading: "Time Is A Mother" by Ocean Vuong