It is impossible to ignore @Ocean_Vuong’s accolades: He’s won a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Whiting Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and in 2019 his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was long-listed for the National Book Award while spending several weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. His lyrical name is recognized outside of the literary circuit. Only so many authors are; many of them dead. That is to say, Ocean is not in the company of many contemporaries. While the ‘public intellectual’ has been called an endangered species, Ocean is one of the few we have writing today. This is more surprising given his lack of a Twitter presence, where writers often gain popularity for pontificating on anything and everything. Still Ocean, earning continued praise for his deft craftsmanship, is rarely far from the literary conversation. He is a writer’s writer — most comfortable at his desk, mulling over the pliability and banality of language. Ocean broke out in 2016 with his debut collection of poetry Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press).. He enjoyed critical success and more. Fashion magazines, fashion brands, and even Netflix came knocking. Ocean, his star-ascendant, has made, and is making, poetry cool again. Time Is A Mother, Ocean’s second collection of poems, arrives at a very different moment. While she lived long enough to see her son’s phenomenal success, in November 2019, Ocean’s mother passed away. She figures prominently in his first books as the central pillar of his matriarchal, immigrant family. The poems in Time Is A Mother turn away from Ocean’s previous style. Clear narratives expand into more associative timelines while representational imagery gives way to impressionistic scenes. Generally, the speaker of the poems is much less defined than in Ocean’s previous work. In Night Sky and On Earth, Ocean succeeded in making himself legible — as a poet, as a gay man, as an Asian-American. poetry; that it is beautiful, and not too complex. Ocean’s new work puts forward a more experimental point of view. For more, go to #gayletter.com Text by @_christewart Photography by Fujio Emura and Styling by @sho_tatsuishi