Time is a Mother is a collection of poems by Vietnamese-American novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, first published in 2022. Vuong's work often examines different threads of the poet's experiences growing up—he has referred to himself as “a queer Asian American poor kid”—in the context of otherness. These threads are bound together by grief, as the poet mourns his mother who died of cancer in 2019. Vuong recalls of his mother going to the hospital: “When she went herself, she got a heat pad. When I came, with English, she went to the oncology ward" (Chung). Aware of the doors closed to those without access to certain discourses, Vuong crafts his poems with a keen sense of language's ability for both creation and destruction.
This is not the poet's first time writing an address to a mother who will never read it. Vuong's 2019 epistolary novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous follows Little Dog, a young Vietnamese immigrant marginalized for being poor and gay. The book is written as a letter to Little Dog's mother, Hồng (which translates to Rose). She shares the name with Vuong's own mother, who never learned to read. In the aftermath of his mother's death, Vuong sits with his grief in Time is a Mother and seeks to delve deeper into his own life and sense of self through the act of writing. He has called grief "the last and final translation of love."
