(The novel even shares its title with a poem from that collection.) In a piece from Night Sky, Vuong lays bare the harrowing equation of his existence: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. He bares so much of himself, he acknowledges, because his mother, who is illiterate, will never be able to read his letter: “he very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.” Thematically, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous covers ground Vuong first approached in his outstanding 2016 poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Little Dog writes to his mother about their family, the war they emerged from, and the generational trauma they share. In its finest moments, Vuong’s prose features the sort of tender, aphoristic flourishes and sense of lived experience contained in the work of James Baldwin, who Vuong gives a “deep bow” to in the novel’s acknowledgments. The first chapter of the novel received publication two years ago in The New Yorker, categorized then as “personal history.” Little Dog also shares obvious similarities with his author-Vietnamese American, late twenties, a writer who reached New York City by way of Saigon, Vietnam and Hartford, Connecticut-and these parallels make On Earth all the more affecting. On Earth is not a memoir, yet it certainly does not shy away from the biographical. Such is the devastating terrain of Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, which charts the violence and beauty that follows from human connection with startling empathy-startling, in part, for Vuong’s proximity to Little Dog. “To love something,” Little Dog ruminates in his letter, “is to name it something so worthless it might be left untouched-and alive.” Evil spirits-the thinking went in her Vietnamese village-would skip over the weakest, easiest prey if they were named something hideous. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter to a mother from her son, beginning from the riddles of distance: “Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you-even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” The son goes by Little Dog, a moniker his grandmother gave him as an act of protection. ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ by Ocean Vuong
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