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In Time Is a Mother, Poet Ocean Vuong Explores Love and Loss | Time

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“This book is all of me—I’m fully here. That feels kind of like a death in itself, as well as a celebration"

In March 2019, three months before the publication of Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , he called his agent from the hallway of a Hartford, Conn., hospital. “There’s no way I can go on tour,” he said. “My mother has cancer. It’s over.” The first time his mother, Hong, had gone to the emergency room with terrible back pain, he wasn’t with her. The hospital sent her home with an adhesive heat patch. Vuong, who lives in Northampton, Mass., with his partner Peter, went to see her and took her back to the ER; this time, doctors ran tests and returned with a diagnosis: Stage IV b

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