In “Amazon History of a Nail Salon Worker,” part of Ocean Vuong’s latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother, manicure products are listed alongside mother-and-son-themed birthday cards. Some of the purchases, like Sally Hansen nail polish, make sense because of the title, while others cause questions:
what is “Chemo-Glam cotton head scarf, sunrise pink” doing here? Did the subject of this fastidious log
get diagnosed with cancer? A subsequent entry, ‘Warrior Mom’ Breast Cancer awareness T-shirt, pink and
white,” seems to confirm this suspicion. Without knowing the name of the nail salon worker or her
relationship to the author, I found myself celebrating the moments of comfort she seemed to find in each purchase—in February she bought a Yankee Candle in the scent, “Midsummer’s Night.”
The items that seem most redolent of motherhood and the invisible speaker who moves through
these purchases capture the sense of tenderness and isolation between an immigrant mother and her son, a dynamic Vuong already established he could portray excellently in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an epistolary collection published in 2019. Some poems in “Time” continue in this epistolary vein, addressed to “Sara” or “T,” but having struggled extensively with mental health, I was especially keen to the incorporation of mental health themes. In one of the poems in section I, Vuong asks, “What’s wrong with me, Doc?/ There must be a pill for this.” His poetic self-interrogation shows him grasping for an earthly cure even as he turns away from it as a scene of bloodshed, and asking whether even the most intense and rigorous examination of self from the lens of mental-health is enough to wash away the bloodstains of history. In one of my favorite poems from the collection, “Not Even”, Vuong does not gaze detachedly; he first claims the Time magazine Vietnam War photograph as representive of “my people,” but ultimately he identifies with the mangled soldier and the bloodied corpse in the most visceral sense, calling it “us,” a switch to a deliberate and carefully considered, yet insular, plural first-person, as in the series of letters in “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” speaking from within and for his community. There is no celebration or victory in the poems that deal with history, besides the feeble irony that embitters his poems about sexuality in “Not Even,” for example.
I haven’t read a ton of Ocean Vuong’s poetry since On Earth, and even in that poetry collection
Vuong begins to trace his history with his parents, the fraught immigrant origins he has in war-stricken
Vietnam, and begins his lucid, raw, detail-filled style. In Time he builds on his characteristic technique of
enjambment to create poems that both expand on notions of identity and collapse in on themselves in
painful areas. Incorporating the vintage heterosexual maleness of Americana, aol chat boards, and a
monthly diary told only through Amazon purchases, Time is a Mother shows Vuong distancing himself
from a source of great pain, but nevertheless images resurface and voices reappear, etched and burned into the double exposure of a consciousness still reeling from grief.
Some of the most grief-stricken poems read as mantras for healing over grief and suffering, as in
“Reasons for staying,” which contains several lines that begin with “because,” like the solution to a math
problem for interpreting the infinite: “because this body is my last address,” “Because I stopped
apologizing into visibility.” Continuing in the characteristic unabashedness for tackling the big questions
which Vuong demonstrated in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, his first full-length poetry collection published
in 2016, Vuong builds a lattice-work of conversations, thoughts, and visual details. Some poems, such as
“Old Glory,” use coarse euphemisms evoking Vietnam to service male-centered hookup culture, as when a disembodied voice states, “That girl’s a grenade. It was like Nam down there. I’d still slam it though.” This frank restatement, almost verbatim, of how some people really talk, filtered through a sensitive mind, denies its own complicity, especially juxtaposed with poems that deal more explicitly with Vietnam. Others contain the colloquialisms of a person talking to themselves out of failure, such as “Beautiful Short Loser” which begins, “Stand back, I’m a loser on a winning streak,” describing the feeling of defeat as, “the way they’ll remember god after religion: alone, impossible & good.” Still more poems play roughly with the Judeo-Christian model while also tracing the habits and routines of the everyday mundane, elevating them to a higher realm. Vuong briefly references the forbidden fruit and the myth of a new race created from Adam’s rib, but always returns to earth, “where the bones of my people/still dream of me.” Yet Vuong traverses heaven and earth easily, from apocalyptic visions of wavering faith and Noah’s Ark in “Waterline,” to the gentle air of someone getting to feel okay again, as when the narrator of “Rise and Shine” proceeds to cook eggs with garlic, fish sauce, and scallions, and punnily notes, “The pan bubbling/into a small possible/ sun. I am/ a decent son.”
Like the characters brought to life in Thi Bui’s memoir, The Best We Could Do, unable to escape the past, Vuong evokes isolation with lines such as, “Maybe,/ like you, I was one of those people/ who loves the world most/ when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car/ going nowhere,” recalling a memory from Bui’s childhood of driving down a highway with her family, where she visualizes all the cars in the opposite lane as going to heaven and hers as going to hell. Another one of the pages in Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, which shows the silhouette of a girl with a Vietnam-shaped aperture in her torso, reveals the tremendous gap left from trying to reconnect with the country of her heritage, and suggests that even when pasted into American history textbooks through gory photographs, a war-ravaged history still finds a way to make its presence felt through secondhand trauma.
Vuong seems to teeter on the edge of a solipsistic morality as he muses to himself in “Not Even,” which rages quietly: “I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.// To be a dam for damage. My shittyness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.” On the other hand, other poems seem quietly centered, presumably taking place in a medical setting. In a morgue that doubles as a therapy center, Vuong tries to control the aftershock of his mother’s passing, his breakdown only hinted by the peripheral voice of a midwestern woman who murmurs, “You get that out now. No shame in breakin’ open,” which makes Vuong “lose it even more” before she returns with cups of tea.
Above all, poetry deals with language, and as a consummate master of his craft, Vuong is aware
that the very material he uses to architect his poems, English, resonates and aches with loss. As a
linguistics major, I know there is a term for this—language attrition, experienced by speakers of heritage
languages in circumstances where they must assimilate. Vuong both cannot forget and wants to forget—in “Not Even,” he states,”In my language, the one I recall now/only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu.” Meanwhile, Ars Poetica as the Maker gives some insight into Vuong’s thought process, which
seems, first and foremost, a representation of light, dreams, and a scream “stranded by its language.” The epistolary and whimsical “Dear Sara” suggests writer’s block and existential dread, as with the
introductory quote, “What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white
desert?” (apparently uttered by Vuong’s seven-year-old-cousin.)
Cited: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” 2019
