Fiction by Poets: Ocean Vuong "On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous."

Join me for a discussion of Vuong's debut novel "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous." Vuong is an outstanding poet, thinker, and educator. We are looking at fiction written by poets for writing methods / tropes as well as the fine line between inspired writing and constructed text.

An epistolary semi-autobiographical novel, at once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

Please note that this is a transgressive novel. To have a better sense of transgression as literary tool, please look into Foucault's Introduction to Transgression and Susan Sontag's essay Pornographic Imagination. Both texts can be found online.

And, if you have a chance, please listen to this interview about the novel with Ocean here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2SgM1S7t1c&t=2706s

Zoom link will be posted day of the event.