"By the time you finish reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, you will have understood what Ocean Vuong meant when he said, “I wrote a phantom novel.� The phantom is about the past; the phantom straddles multiple worlds, passing and trespassing; the phantom clings to something long gone, inconsolable and beyond reach; the phantom lingers in the periphery, dreaming of a center that might hold; and, ultimately, the phantom remembers. The word, therefore, could not fit more perfectly into the contours of a novel that is fraught with history, cobbled together from truth and fiction, haunted by American violence, and primarily addressed to a spectral audience.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is structurally, formally, and thematically haunted—a˛Ô»ĺ haunting. The novel is written in the form of a letter, addressed from a son to his mother who can’t read; a recipient who, like a ghost, is not promised—only longed for. “Dear Ma,â€� it begins, like an invocation meant to save him, “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.â€� The narrator is Little Dog, a nickname given to him by his grandmother because “to love something is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—a˛Ô»ĺ alive,â€� and his words are arms that cannot hold his illiterate mother whose education was capped at the age of five after a napalm raid destroyed her schoolhouse in Vietnam. The reader can just imagine her there, hovering at the edge of remembrance: stooped with decades of working in factories and nail salons, wilting her like an unwatered flower—those places “where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaidâ€� (86). A mother the tighter he gripped, the more she melted away. Like trying to hold on to the reflection of the moon.

The mother is a ghost who remains distant and unreachable because the medium is English: the language that is most knowable, abundant, and malleable to the son, but which is an impenetrable country to his mother. The act of impossible transmission is therefore an act of impossible translation. How can the English language, asks the novel, hold the complexity of this fraught and fragile inquiry between mother and son? And further, if a letter is only made possible by whom it is addressed to, then what is the use for language in the absence of a destination? In many places in the world, the English language is what makes people eligible—a˛Ô»ĺ legible. If you don't have the language, you are not seen. If you are not seen, you are locked outside comprehension. “Your mouth,â€� to borrow some of Vuong’s words, “is what gets you visibility.â€� With every morsel of English that grows and blossoms in Little Dog’s mouth, so too does the burden of translation. Little Dog must make his family visible by translating America to them and translating them to America—a˛Ô»ĺ because the language is English, the stakes are enormous. The stakes are the perils of erasure, invisibility, and the deep terrible pain of betraying his parents in order to preserve them. “This is the oppressor’s language, â€� in Adrienne Rich’s words, and the more of it Little Dog commits to paper, the further he is from his mother. And yet, as Rich also concedes in that same poem, Little Dog needs it to talk to her.

Little Dog's fraught and complex relationship with language seeps into form as well. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is rendered in a brilliantly haphazard collection of vignettes: some several pages long, others only the space of a paragraph or two, often separated by a line, like two shores with no desire to touch but to simply achieve proximity. Even within these vignettes, disjointed memories clamor like bells, each one chiming against the next. There’s no chronology to follow here: Little Dog traces his way through this dizzying skein of tangled memory by a wanderer’s less certain compass. He recounts the past in tangents, detours, and circuits. He veers from the story, recomposes it, reaffirms it, goes back in time, recalls it, calls it back. Like a ghost, Vuong’s form is all restlessness. This circularity, however, is not without purpose. It is redolent of queer and feminist thinking, a breaking with hegemonic narrative structures that favor easy, balanced, and digestible renderings. What Vuong does, and powerfully so, is demonstrate what language can do when it’s unfettered from the strictures of narrative, and the detours thus become, not symptoms of language failing, but rather a safe passage to a destination. Even if the destination is a dead end, because “to be lost,� in Vuong’s hands, “is not to be wrong, but to be more.�

This push and pull of language, this breaking open of form into meaning, makes On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous so clearly the novel of a poet. But halfway through, the novel also literally disintegrates into poetry. That On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous can contain both prose and poetry inside the skin of a single novel is not just craftsmanship, it is also necessity. These moments of collapse expose both the enormity of Little Dog’s trauma and the difficulty of recounting it. They occur when Little Dog is overstrained by too much responsibility, too much fear and uncertainty: Little Dog’s fugitive love affair with Trevor, a boy whose youth is withering into earth with every swallow of the opioids he’s addicted to. Little Dog’s grandmother—once a teenage bride escaping an arranged marriage, “her body, her purple dress…[keeping] her alive� (35) as a prostitute for American GIs—succumbing more and more to the dark pull of schizophrenia. Little Dog lost between all the contradictions of his mother, her love and her blows, the heart-breaking paradox of traumatized parents subjecting their children to trauma in an effort to spare them from trauma. To live in an American body, the novel seems to say, is to be constantly on the verge of falling apart. And when language falls apart—stretching and tearing with the strain of violence, of trauma, of too many ghosts—it crumbles into poetry. Caressing, fluid, unforgettable poetry. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s restless poetic explorations push the English language to its limits, breaking it apart. The poetry, in this sense, is realized in the aftermath of insuperable prose. When a story is too heavy for the medium supposed to carry it, collapse is inevitable—but collapse is not failure. It's salvation. There’s art in the debris, the novel insists, and a promise to start over. Thus, in breaking into poetry, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous also breaks itself towards completion: a few (poetic) pages later, the novel picks itself up again, and continues in prose. The fractures are not just survivable, they are a stepping-stone towards wholeness.

What Vuong does in this novel—with language and form, and how he then transmutes that into thematic valence—is nothing short of extraordinary. I'm left simply, helplessly in awe."