The poet Ocean Vuong says two years after he lost his mother to cancer, he was feeling "smug in [his] healing" — when the worst moment came. "One day, I woke up in the middle of the night, two ...

Jeffrey Yang, the editor of “The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman,” on Whitman's work.

If your name is Ocean, writing lyric poetry may come to you as naturally as breathing. Born in Saigon, Ocean Vuong came to the U.S. as a refugee and now lives in New York, where he weaves his ...

Ocean Vuong’s first poems were born of uncertainty. In 2008, grieving for his grandmother in the Hartford, Connecticut, apartment where she helped raise him, Vuong turned to the page.

Ocean Vuong's second poetry collection, Time is a Mother, grapples with time and its impermanence following his mother's death in 2019.

Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong's latest poetry collection, can be read holistically as a paradox, zen koan, or the poetic equivalent of a Möbius strip. Time, normally associated with death and ...