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A review by smart_as_paint
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
5.0
This book is poetry.
That's not hastily written praise for the writing style. It's an incontrovertible fact— like how water is not blue or death does not end love. Prose is many but poetry is lots. The sentences are uncountable beauty, each word a droplet, coalescing to become a liquid whole. Poetry is a woodcut wave of subjective reality, crashing down with the unstoppable flood of feeling. And what an endless pounding feeling that is.
The Ocean pulls no punches.
Just when you think the white claws have been sheathed and it's safe to unfurl your heart again, another storm breaks. There is no safe harbor. Each new swelling rubs your heart raw. You've become concerned with finishing the book because you know that someone is going to die. If only you had the strength to set it aside, then perhaps you could live in a world of only first times. But the reader's sacred contract is not an easy one to break. The poem demands to be finished. Why do all the books that make me care also have to break my heart? The only choice is to hang on for dear life.
And dear life is such an apt description. Not only does the poem take the form of an epistolary cry to an unresponsive parent but it revels in the breathtaking mundanity of being. Of being queer in the early 2000s. Of being in love. Of Being the child of a mother and the grandchild of a grandmother. Of being alive despite all evidence to the contrary.
Pick up this book if you dare. I'm just not sure you'll ever put it down again.
That's not hastily written praise for the writing style. It's an incontrovertible fact— like how water is not blue or death does not end love. Prose is many but poetry is lots. The sentences are uncountable beauty, each word a droplet, coalescing to become a liquid whole. Poetry is a woodcut wave of subjective reality, crashing down with the unstoppable flood of feeling. And what an endless pounding feeling that is.
The Ocean pulls no punches.
Just when you think the white claws have been sheathed and it's safe to unfurl your heart again, another storm breaks. There is no safe harbor. Each new swelling rubs your heart raw. You've become concerned with finishing the book because you know that someone is going to die. If only you had the strength to set it aside, then perhaps you could live in a world of only first times. But the reader's sacred contract is not an easy one to break. The poem demands to be finished. Why do all the books that make me care also have to break my heart? The only choice is to hang on for dear life.
And dear life is such an apt description. Not only does the poem take the form of an epistolary cry to an unresponsive parent but it revels in the breathtaking mundanity of being. Of being queer in the early 2000s. Of being in love. Of Being the child of a mother and the grandchild of a grandmother. Of being alive despite all evidence to the contrary.
Pick up this book if you dare. I'm just not sure you'll ever put it down again.