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A review by allthings
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
3.0
I'm torn on how to rate this as I swing back and forth between "wow, this is so beautiful and deep and too smart for me" and "this is a bunch of pretty nonsense that would work best as instagram captions".
Ocean Vuong has an incredibly different lived experience to my own, and I appreciate this insight into it, but at the same time, many of the poems here feel too dense with deeply personal context for me to relate to. I was also surprised to learn that the author is in their 30s, as there was a lot of the kind of angst and trite aphorisms that I would expect from a younger author. At the same time, the willingness to grapple with uncomfortable topics and the way his raw emotion reaches through the text is inspiring.
Like I said, I'm torn on it. There were several poems that moved me and spoke to me on a subconscious level, but there were also many instances where I reread a line several times and couldn't for the life of me work out what it was trying to say. But of course, enjoyment of poetry is very subjective, and I think there's a lot to love here for the right audience.
Ocean Vuong has an incredibly different lived experience to my own, and I appreciate this insight into it, but at the same time, many of the poems here feel too dense with deeply personal context for me to relate to. I was also surprised to learn that the author is in their 30s, as there was a lot of the kind of angst and trite aphorisms that I would expect from a younger author. At the same time, the willingness to grapple with uncomfortable topics and the way his raw emotion reaches through the text is inspiring.
Like I said, I'm torn on it. There were several poems that moved me and spoke to me on a subconscious level, but there were also many instances where I reread a line several times and couldn't for the life of me work out what it was trying to say. But of course, enjoyment of poetry is very subjective, and I think there's a lot to love here for the right audience.