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A review by jonscott9
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

4.0

This wasn't a typical vacation read, but as I sat on Cape Cod and grappled early with the tragic and beautiful weight of it, I remembered that I once read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven while backpacking through Europe by train. Reading most of this stunning book upon returning from vaca, it definitely required a certain frame of mind to focus and alternately deal with and relish in its consequence and beauty.

Little Dog and his mother Rose are immigrants who find a range of social, economic and cultural difficulties in Hartford, Connecticut, of all places. The liquid-chemical residue from her nail-technician job mix with the sweat appearing on her "I <3 NY" shirt as Rose tries to help her son with something in their home, one of many enduring images from this book of autofiction.

Pangs of past youthful shame and desire rose up inside me as they do for Little Dog in some sections of his account of tryst after yearning tryst with fellow teen Trevor, grandson of a farm owner whose tobacco Little Dog takes a job to help pick.

To crib a line from the singer-songwriter Feist, "So much past inside my present." That's true of Little Dog, of his mother Rose and grandmother Lan, and of Vuong himself. It's true of all of us, which is why his remarkably specific experiences turn universal for many, whether non-white immigrant or not. That's not to downplay his life story; he is helping a lot of people pull back the veil of what befell or welled up in or comforted or saved them.

Too many triumphant turns of phrase and entire lines and passages in this one to pick out one or a few of them. This is poetry as prose, and I'm turning to Time Is a Mother, Vuong's latest batch of poems, directly after writing this. We're "briefly gorgeous" in this mortal coil, though thankfully, works like this are everlasting.