From the Bookshelf of EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club…

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong

Start date: August 1, 2025

Finish date: August 31, 2025

Discussion: MODERN / POPULAR READS

Why we're reading this: August 2025 - Modern

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MODERN / POPULAR READS

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - *SPOILERS*
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last updated Aug 26, 2025 11:57AM

The Alchemist — *SPOILERS*
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What Members Thought

Jun 28, 2023 Beth rated it really liked it

“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous does tell a story, but it’s a story in shards that float, sometimes seemingly at random, and in the end they don’t so much cohere as become more fully realized. As is appropriate from a writer best known for his poetry, the poem reads like a verse narrative.
It is a meditation on love and mortality, beauty, the Viet Nam war and its aftermath, racial identity, gender, queernes “I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous does tell a story, but it’s a story in shards that float, sometimes seemingly at random, and in the end they don’t so much cohere as become more fully realized. As is appropriate from a writer best known for his poetry, the poem reads like a verse narrative.
It is a meditation on love and mortality, beauty, the Viet Nam war and its aftermath, racial identity, gender, queerness, monsters, monarch butterflies, buffalo, the opioid crisis, poverty, the nature of family, and the challenges of reading and writing.

The book is written in the form of a letter to the narrator’s mother, Rose, who, ironically cannot read, so one wonders how much the narrator, known as Little Dog, really wants Rose to know about his life. The challenges of communicating with those we love is one of the core issues of the book. In addition to being an exploration of Little Dog’s relationships with his mother, grandmother, and grandfather, the book also depicts Little Dog’s tentative exploration of his sexuality and his love for a boy who, we gradually learn, is addicted to Oxycontin.

Little Dog and his family are natives of Viet Nam; Little Dog struggles with his identity, and not only as an Asian immigrant and a gay man: “sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being; while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me? . . . Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure. Just as I don’t know what to call you—White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is not an easy book to read, in more senses than one, but it is a deeply evocative and moving book.
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May 17, 2021 Chanie rated it really liked it

It’s a beautiful book, basically poetry in prose form. You have to, though, be in the headspace for darkness to appreciate it. I didn’t read it at the right time so I enjoyed it less than I may have earlier in my life. Right now, I want to know about people who are toiling to move through their darkness, not make an art form out of it.

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