Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
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Web ID: 13391813Moving
Vuong has an innate ability to manipulate language in a way that is innovative and miraculous. Reading this felt like reading art - an act of wondrous beauty.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Breathtaking
I don’t really have a lot to say, but I loved this book and recommend it to everyone
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
a beautiful book, touching and heart wrenching
this book is truly a masterpiece. i love vuong, specifically on earth we're briefly gorgeous, so i am a little bias. but, i thought this book was truly an amazing book. if you do decide to read this novel please be aware there are many sensitive topics in this writing.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Misleading Review by B&N
I found this to be very disturbing and not at all about loving his mother. It is an anguished catharsis for the author and led to feelings of pity for him. There is no way I would recommend this book.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
lacking, but has some hidden treasures
ARC provided by NetGalley. Thank you so much to them and the publishers! So, I had a hard time with this. I requested this book because while I haven't read any of OV's works in full, I have adored every excerpt I've read from him. I also will fully admit I know almost nothing about poetry except for being able to look at something and decide if I liked it or not. I... am torn. Poetry is so personal and individual. It makes it hard to review objectively, especially coming from a very casual reader of it. I really enjoyed a few poems here, but overall I felt as if most poems were all over the place, and not in the way that made OV's previous excerpts I've read so charming. They felt extremely convoluted, and after two or three readings of each poem I still would come out the other side feeling like I didn't understand anything. Maybe it's just me! Who's to say. Many poems also felt a bit... edgy? The references to blood and awful things and the way they were written often struck me a bit... Tumblr-esque? Which is sad, because I've found OV's way with words so charming before. That said, when the poems worked, they worked. I'll preface this section with a personal note by saying I waited to read this ARC on my mom's birthday. It's a bit of a sad day for me, but she passed away from cancer when I was a teenager. Perhaps because of this— and perhaps why these poems read as so much more earnest and true— I found the strongest poems in this collection relate to OV's mother, and the relationship with grief that we form when we lose ours. Overall, I do suggest people try this out for themselves! <b>Favorites:</b> - Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker - Woodworking at the End of the World - Dear Rose - Nothing - Reasons for Staying
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Beautiful book of poems
Ocean Vuong takes his readers on a journey through life via this book of beautiful poems. Full of hardships and beauty with glimpses of hope among the struggles, these words will it with me for a long time to come. Two poems that stand out: 1) the Amazon shopping list of his mother who has cancer 2) the rewind through his life. This is the first book I’ve read by Ocean and I can’t wait to read more.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Profoundly Visceral and Emotional
Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong is a collection of poetry primarily based on the relationships and experiences Vuong had in his real life, in particular his mother Rose. The first half of the poems in this novel, although well written, often left me confused as to what the author was trying to convey. This is not to discredit the book, since I did love a bunch of poems from the first half of the novel including “Dear Peter”, “Skinny Dipping”, “The Last Dinosaur”, “The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica”, “Dear T”, and “Not Even”. Some poems in parts I and II boded well for me and some didn’t, mostly due to a lack of clarity in some of the poems. Vuong’s writing style overall is hauntingly beautiful and complexly layered; each time you reread the poems in this collection you reveal to yourself a new perspective in the story, a new concept that connects to the overall undercurrent of the novel. The second half of the book is truly where the heart of the story lay. Vuong’s writing is all-consuming; he writes from the perspectives of people, places, and things that you never would’ve thought to read from and it resonates with you. It’s evident that Vuong wrote the poems in this collection from a place deep within his heart, especially and obviously including the poems about his mother Rose. I’ve always believed that writing is a healing power and I thought it was intriguing how Vuong uses poetry as a way to heal himself and to communicate with the people who have left him scarred, even when they cannot begin to understand him or what he’s trying to say.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com