Time Is a Mother Essay Questions

In Time is a Mother, Vuong writes three poems that directly address family. Discuss an important characteristic in each of these particular poems.

These poems are titled "Dear Peter," "Dear Sara," and "Dear Rose." All three are written with little punctuation, except for one dash each in "Dear Sara" and "Dear Rose." This creates a long phrase that runs on almost without breath and asks the reader to move from line to line rather quickly. This allows the images that Vuong evokes to transform quickly into others or to take on double meanings through polysemy and connotation.

An example of a double meaning in "Dear Peter" is when the poet writes of no longer being stranded at sea in terms of his mental health, then writes, "I'm gonna / dock some days" (Lines 16-17). The sea as unstable mental ground and the shore as safety is a metaphor that the poem returns to.

In "Dear Sara," the poem goes from subject to subject (following the figurative ants to bones buried in the desert to waving through words to shrapnel to relapsing to an image of Sara's father to elephants, etc) until the dash appears. This section reads, "it doesn't / have to make sense to be / real—you aunt Rose gone / two years now" (Lines 30-33). The poem builds up steam until it runs out of breath right as it arrives at what the poem is really about. This centers the subject of the speaker's mother within the context of writing and sense-making, a theme returned to throughout the collection.

"Dear Rose" is a culmination of the speaker's relationship to his mother as evoked through writing. The mother's illiteracy in life and her absence in death have given rise to a poem that becomes self-aware of its own dramatic situation. Vuong engages in authorial intrusion when he writes, "Pink Rose Hồng Mom / are you reading this dear / reader are you my mom yet / I cannot find her without you this / place I've made you can't / enter" (Lines 129-134). The "you" oscillates between the speaker's mother and the reader, and the speaker's relationship with his mother in these poems becomes a relationship to all else (time, writing, himself, others, and the world).

How is the character and concept of "Mother" portrayed in the collection?

There is the character of the speaker's mother that Vuong refers to as Rose, Hồng, Ma, Mom, or Mother throughout the collection, her outlined absence, and the concept of time as a mother. She first appears in "Snow Theory" as a "dry outline" in the snow, which the speaker lies on and makes snow angels that look like "something being destroyed in a blizzard" (Line 16). But in the poem "Rise & Shine," the mother appears as an actual figure with a body: her "face // at the window" (Lines 42-43). "Amazon History of a Former / Nail Salon Worker" evokes both the mother's character and her absence through the bare list form. The poem "Not Even" gives the collection its title, establishing the concept of mother as time, encompassing all origins and relationships.

In what ways does Vuong write about war?

War both creates and destroys in this collection, and is used as a metaphor for mental health and the act of writing itself. The Vietnam War and the evacuation of Saigon led to Vuong's family seeking refuge in the Philippines before being granted asylum in the United States. Bullets are scattered throughout the poems in the collection, and they are not just meaningless forces of destruction. In "Dear Rose," bullets connect to the very act of writing about the war that impacted Vuong's family. Because of the use of enjambment, one portion of a longer sentence takes on the meaning "by a bullet I was born" (Line 33). In various interviews, Vuong has spoken about what it means to have been born out of violence and to make sense of that violence through writing poetry.

War is also a word that Vuong uses to describe his struggles with mental health problems and substance addiction. In "Beautiful Short Loser," he writes, "Inside my head, the war is everywhere" (Line 29).

Choose a poem and analyze how the form and content engage with one another.

"Amazon History of a Former / Nail Salon Worker" is a catalog poem that evokes the character of the speaker's mother solely through her Amazon purchase history in the months before her death. For example, the list for April reads, "Chemo-Glam cotton scarf, flower garden print / 'Warrior Mom' Breast Cancer awareness T-shirt, pink and / white" (Lines 59-62). This makes it clear that the mother deals with pain, but she still takes care in her personal appearance. The “'Warrior Mom' Breast Cancer awareness T-shirt" gives a strong sense of the character's identity as a mother. Overall, the poet lets the items on the list speak for themselves. No insight into the mother's purchases is explicitly provided, leaving the reader to imagine the character solely based on her possessions.

How does the act of writing itself appear thematically?

Vuong is aware of language's ability to both create and destroy. In "American Legend," he writes his father into a story about a car crash just so that he may "hold / [his] father" (Lines 88-89). He then informs his mother, "Words, the prophets / tell us, destroy / nothing they can’t rebuild" (Lines 85-88). Writing a scene of destruction gives way to intimacy.

When Vuong's little cousin Sara questions the point of writing "if you're just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white desert," Vuong responds with a poem that figuratively follows the ants ("Dear Sara"). "It doesn't / have to make sense to be / real—," the poet writes right before mentioning how long it's been since his mother's death (Lines 30-32). Writing is Vuong's way of making sense of the violence and love in his origin.

Words and bullets are compared in the poem "Dear Rose," which likens the act of writing to war. The entering of words into a person's understanding is the same in this poem as bullets entering flesh. Both serve as acts of redefinition.