Relationship to Mother
In the wake of the poet's loss of his mother, he considers the question of what a mother is, including and beyond the person who gave birth to you. The character or force of "Mother" appears in the collection as an incarnation, as memory, and as a metaphor for time. She is the origin from which the speaker was "lifted, wet and bloody...into the / world, screaming // and enough" ("Not Even" Lines 96-98). It is not just the biological sense of origin that the speaker explores, but his entire sense of self.
In "Rise & Shine," the speaker refers to himself as a "decent son" (Line 22). The poem complicates this by opening the poem with the image of the speaker taking a day's worth of his mother's tips to buy drugs. But before he leaves the house, the speaker cooks for his mother a dish made with eggs, fish sauce, scallions, and garlic that she had taught him how to make. This implies that the mother and son in this poem (and in others) still strive to take care of each other despite their struggles.
Vuong's direct address to his mother in "Dear Rose" is a culmination of his relationship to her as evoked through writing. Her 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 speaker's relationship with his mother in these poems becomes a relationship to all else (time, writing, himself, others, and the world).
Personal Loss
The main topic of loss in this collection centers on the death of the poet's mother and the subsequent years of grieving. However, other forms of loss also color the collection. In "Snow Theory," an image of the speaker lying over an outline of his mother in the snow as they make snow angels is bordered by the repeating line "I haven't killed a thing since." At times violent and shameful, this particular personal loss is referenced several times throughout the collection. Perhaps it can best be explained by this description from the epigraph poem, "The Bull": "I was a boy— / which meant I was a murderer / of my childhood" (Lines 8-10). The speaker blames himself for something inevitable brought about by the passage of time. According to these poems, this kind of loss can chip away at you until "You can be nothing // & still breathing" ("Tell Me Something Good" Lines 33-34).
The Act of Writing
Often engaging in ars poetica and in meditations on the act of writing in general, 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). 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). The retrieval and re-creation inherent in writing about absence appear in the form of a creation story ("Ars Poetica as the Maker"). But as in a great deal of Vuong's work, creation and beauty are often tinged with violence.
Doorways and Transformations
In the epigraph poem "The Bull," the speaker reaches towards an animal-shaped entrance that is compared to the speaker himself. In Zen Buddhism, of which Vuong is a practitioner, The Ten Bulls of Zen is a metaphoric progression of the steps toward self-realization and enlightenment. This story establishes the theme of exploring things as doorways in Time is a Mother. In the poem that gives the collection its title, Vuong writes, "Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I'll pass / through" ("Not Even" Lines 86-87). At times, there is not yet a way to pass through. In "Beautiful Short Loser," someone has been crying in a room called America, to which "the door is not invented yet" (Lines 52-54). To be locked in the figurative room, or in one's head, is a cause for suffering in the poems. But the collection is hopeful, with the poet asking to "enter / this nearly-gone yes // the way death enters / anything—fully / & without a trace" ("Waterline" Lines 22-26).
War
Vuong addresses war in his work by zooming out on a geopolitical scale and honing in on the stories of his family in the context of the Vietnam War and the evacuation of Saigon. A woman once told Vuong he's lucky to be able to write about war, but this "luck" bears the mark of violence and forced separation ("Not Even"). Vuong's people had to "dance to the rhythm" of "machine-gun fire" (Lines 34 and 33). Bullets are scattered through 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. In an instance of enjambment, one line reads: "by a bullet I was born" (Line 33). This relates to a line from Vuong's other collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds: "An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. // Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me." The irony of war giving way to the poet's own existence sheds light on his interest in the ways that violence and creation intersect.
Addiction
Connecticut, where Vuong grew up, was among the top ten states hit hardest during the (ongoing) opioid crisis. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, "Increased prescription of opioid medications like oxycodone and hydrocodone led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids." Vuong states in an interview with The Guardian, 'I was addicted to everything you could crush into a white powder' (Allardice). "Dear Peter" is set in a treatment center where the speaker appears to be overcoming his addiction. In "Dear Sara," the speaker laments relapsing. It is no mistake that the poet places these two poems in the collection with the relapse coming after the treatment. This positioning demonstrates the difficult road of recovering from addiction. "Rise & Shine" portrays the relationship of a working mother and her son who is addicted to drugs.
Intimacy and Violence
Vuong writes about certain intimacies as being entwined with violence. In particular, the idea of a father figure is portrayed in a violent light. Starved for touch, the speaker in "American Legend" tells a story about crashing the car just so that he may touch his father. In "Künstlerroman," the speaker, while rewinding a tape of his own life, watches the violence that his father inflicts on his mother:
...His father's fist retracts from her
nose, whose shape realigns like a fixed glitch. If I slowed it
down here, I might mistake the man's knuckles for a caress,
as if soothing something with the back of his hand so it
won't fall apart. (174-179).
The violence is undone and figured into a gesture of caress. In another moment of the poem, older men sexually initiate the boy speaker online with dirty questions and "unsolicited dick pics" (Line 139). Vuong presents these images in their full complexity without steering the reader towards a particular moral judgment.
