GUEST WRITER BRADLEY GAMBLE RECOMMENDS ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS BY OCEAN VUONG
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is a raw, tender reflection of being a newcomer, being a queer youth, and the complicated love between a son and his mother. This novel is styled as a letter written by a son to his illiterate mother; as you read, you feel as if you’d opened someone else’s mail on accident, as the narrator reveals intimate moments of his adolescence which he knows his mother cannot read. Vuong mixes prose with poetry, providing a large scope of opportunity for classroom discussion. The narrator explores his identity and the external social forces that shape who he is, a topic everyone, particularly high schoolers, may relate to.
Themes covered include masculinity, race, class, and intergenerational trauma. This novel is written quite accessibly and may be of interest to students interested in gender and masculinity, poetry, queerness, immigrant experience, and novels that are written as auto-fiction. CW: addiction, death, parental abuse.
Bradley Gamble (he/him) is a Bachelor of Education student at UNB. He is passionate about advocacy, harm reduction, and learning through dialogue. He is interested in poetry, postmodernism, and pop music.