Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. April is National Poetry Month. And a lot of the times when people tell you that, they'll usually also mention the T.S. Eliot poem that opens with that line, April is the cruelest month. And if you read the next couple of lines, it's clear. It's about how much it sucks and how

much it hurts to live surrounded by death and loss, something the poet Ocean Vuong knows a

thing or two about. His latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother, deals with his grief

after losing family members. And he tells NPR's Rachel Martin about the importance of preserving

beauty when fighting for your life. And just a heads up, this conversation does touch on the subject

of suicide. Here's the interview. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

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The writer Ocean Vuong has this ability to describe the parts of the human experience that are

indescribable for most of us. He does it again in his latest book of poetry called Time

is a Mother. It's his first since the death of his mother from cancer in 2019.

And that's where we started our conversation,

that most universal kind of loss that is so different for each of us.

I think for me, it was hard to believe that someone could vanish.

You know, the worst moment for me came actually two years after she was gone. And I realized

what many people have already realized was grief is not linear. And I thought I had it all

figured out. I was so smug in my healing that I thought, you know, two years gone, I can, I'm teaching again, I'm writing.

And then one day I woke up in the middle of the night, two in the morning, and I thought,

oh God, I got to tell my mom this thing. I had this brilliant idea I want to tell her.

And I get out of bed. I go all the way downstairs in the dark,

...