Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Published 2022 · 24,200 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is Time Is a Mother to read?
Time Is a Mother scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Contemporary vocabulary with sudden lyric heights.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Lines broken against the sentence, some poems in prose.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Grief handled almost entirely in figure.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Compressed.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- A speaker close to the poet, addressing a dead mother.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The body, the field and the mother recur throughout.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Occasional turns against his own lyricism.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Poems end on images, not conclusions.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- A sequence with several formal experiments.
How Time Is a Mother is regarded
Time Is a Mother holds a literary regard score of 52 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.