What is the narrator point of view in the poetry collection, Time Is a Mother?

The majority of the poems in the collection are written from a speaker who employs first person pronouns. The reader might identify this speaker as a single entity, and might also draw lines between the speaker and the poet himself, Ocean Vuong.

Poems that disrupt these first person patterns include “Old Glory,” “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,” “Toy Boat,” “The Punctum,” and “Tell Me Something Good.” In “Old Glory,” the speaker’s first person pronouns are absent altogether. Rather, the author presents a series of voices in conversation, exchanging colloquialisms such as: “Knock ‘em dead, big guy. Go in there / guns blazing, buddy” (18). The poem continues in a similar manner, the voices remaining disembodied and decontextualized. In “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,” the speaker is similarly absent. Yet because the poem presents a comprehensive list of the speaker’s mother’s Amazon orders, the reader can sense the speaker’s orchestration and thus presence within the poem. “Toy Boat” and “The Punctum” similarly obscure the speaker so as to heighten the poems’ imagistic resonances. Finally, “Tell Me Something Good” employs the second person and first person in order to convey a conversation between the speaker’s adult and childhood selves.