"On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong. I anticipated two books to arrive today, in the mail, and this was one of them. It is billed as a son's letter to his mother, a Vietnamese family in America and the mother was a child herself during the bloody war. The title was titillating and within the first chapter, it has not been a disappointment.
The mother is dead, physically, as this letter is written. The relationship involves abuse from mother to child, after she suffers from PTSD, and her struggles to connect with a young boy, his mounting frustrations, and its sober assessment of a complicated relationship. It leans heavy on symbolism. There is the use of shadow repeated to show that while the mother is abusive, the son, as an adult, is also "a monster." Eyes are loneliness. Death is on every page, and it is almost a stage of sleep, reimagining the blood and injury and death and loss in this relationship. It's beautiful.