"Time, normally associated with death and erasure, embodied in the image of the Greek god Kronos devouring his young, is transformed by the poet into a mother with endlessly regenerative power." - NPR
"Not since Emily Dickinson has poetry conveyed such an oceanic openness to the self’s quiet laceration and resilience. These new poems collect fragile private moments and glue them together, like Joseph Cornell’s collages made out of rescued materials. They are emotionally potent due to their inherent vulnerability. Bullet imagery cuts through the book." - The Guardian
"There’s something about Vuong’s writing that demands all of your lungs. The succinct line arrangement and absence of full stops in poems such as 'Dear Rose' force you to breathe heavy." - The Observer
"Vuong’s virtuosity and vulnerability resonated in a way I hadn’t anticipated. But that’s the essence of Vuong’s talent: he alchemizes deeply individual experiences with universal emotions into what is both familiar and new." - Chicago Review of Books
"There, within the sharp, supple sweetness of Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother, lies both devastation and wry relief for anyone who knows what it is to grieve." - BookReporter
"... builds on the themes of the previous books, displaying a new degree of precision and elegant power in Vuong’s use of form. But that growth extends beyond technical matters. In this book, Vuong gives greater voice to reckoning with loss by embracing survival. Hope exists, yes, but grasped from harrowing circumstances at great cost." - The Nashville Scene
"Nothing short of beautiful. Fresh feeling poems populated with violence, the roadside, love, and what endures. Where war and tragedy and trauma persists, so do the bold spirit in each of these poems, unafraid to look back be tender. What I found most compelling in Time Is a Mother was the rhythm, dilating and breathing one moment, rapid and pulsing the next, capturing the flow of relative time the way only a voice like Vuong’s can." - The Southern Bookseller Review
"... reminiscent of his fantastic first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in the almost surgical superiority with which it does the jobs of insight, emotion, of surprise and beauty, while returning to some of the themes explored by Vuong in earlier work." - The New York Journal of Books
"... quiet, astonishing lyrics. Vuong conjoins the figures of motherhood and time (the speaker’s mother works at a local clock factory, for example), while drawing from the deep wellspring of his Vietnamese heritage." - Booklist
"... a work that seeks to tease beauty from violence, to find life in pain. Indeed, these intentional contradictions have proved lodestars in Vuong’s work, but here he feels scraped rawer than ever, easily sliding between playfulness and acidity, his language both elliptical and meticulous." - Library Journal
"Vuong’s powerful follow-up to Night Sky with Exit Wounds does more than demonstrate poetic growth: it deepens and extends an overarching project with 27 new poems that reckon with loss and impermanence." - Publishers Weekly
