Review: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous By Ocean Vuong

August 7th, 2026

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, is, by my personal tastes, on paper, a book I expected to detest; circa 200 pages, untethered from a plot, heavily reliant on poeticism and imagery, and a part of Oprah’s Book Club. I’ll admit, the first pages are a little slow going; Vuong doesn’t rely on any sturdy foundations of plot or narrative, and the book is both epistolary and also first person, a letter to his mother (Ma) at an undefined point in his (Little Dog’s) life.

It certainly establishes Vuong as an accomplished poet, which is backed up by his resume: a recipient of poetry fellowships and the T.S. Eliot Award in 2017, he clearly built his writing dexterities with poetic force before dabbling into the realm of novelistic fiction. The book doesn’t feel like a novel, however (whatever that even means); most of the time is spent in crystallizing imagery and metaphor from the detritus of small town Connecticut; “…the fields unfolded all around me on both sides, the telephone wires slacked with the weight of crows dotted along the lines, the sporadic white almond trees in full bloom, irrigation ditches where more than a dozen rabbits would drown by summer’s end, their corpses stinking the hot air.”

Little Dog has an abusive Ma. Little Dog’s grandmother Lan is schizophrenic and traumatized by the Vietnam war. Little Dog begins a sexual relationship with a closeted redneck teenager Trevor. Little Dog works on a tobacco farm. Little Dog’s first homosexual partner Trevor overdoses on fentanyl-laced heroin. Little Dog’s grandmother Lan dies on the living room floor, dark purple welling from the cancer in her hip. Little Dog’s relationship to Ma remains complicated.

A thread, all fragmented, fueled, plumped up, distilled, reduced, and strengthened by poetic turns of phrases, careful and poised insights, and cultural artifacts. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is set on its own rhythm, and relies on your willingness, and participation, to align your pedal strokes with its clip. Once you do, the pages flow. The book becomes a sort of pop-up children’s story, flowery and beautiful designs punctuated by a single line, or sentences of reflection, that burst from the page to stick up there for a while.

Patterned design: “It has started to rain; the dirt around the woman’s bare feet is flecked with red-brown quotation marks…”

Pop-up: “At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all— but an orphan.”

Patterned design: “Above it, a handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze.”

Pop-up: “A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just- bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.”

Which isn’t to say the book is gripping from end to end. Vuong relies on a duality of detachment and close observation to allow readers to drift within his images yet also feel enough of a stake to stay tethered to its pages, but the umbilical cord responsible for this at time becomes frayed. Towards the end, he experiments with style when talking about Trevor’s overdose, and this stylistic deviation felt to me both tedious and also unsurprising. It’s obvious that Vuong strays from traditional storytelling or prose structure, so crafting a chapter made of isolated sentences did not have the shock factor or artistic thrust that he displays to great effect throughout the novel. If you are an annotater (for which I am not), your pen will enjoy great use. And while the book is short, I felt that its pacing and overall vision perfectly fit within its 242 pages, because you can’t really stay within his realm for too long without becoming too bored, or immersed; that’s up for you to decide. Plus, he likes MGMT. 7.5/10, Barber Recommends