Books: “On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist. So why the name “Ocean”? Seems his immigrant mother Rose, who worked in a nail salon in Hartford, Connecticut, kept mispronouncing the word “beach” as “b*tch.” A customer told her that a more genteel word to use was “ocean.”

Ocean’s first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is a part-memoir, part-autobiographical account of his first 20 years. He was raised in near-poverty by a bipolar mother who beat and screamed at him, along with his grandmother, a Vietnamese refugee who watched animal documentaries and looked after her troubled daughter.

When Ocean was 15, he took a summer job working on a nearby tobacco farm, where he met and fell in love with Trevor, a sensitive but mixed-up teenage dream who returned his affections but drank too much and became addicted to Oxycontin.

The story is sad—extremely so. But the prose is elegant and poetic—no surprise as Ocean is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. An even more remarkable fun fact: Ocean’s first language wasn’t English. Kudos to the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Penguin Press for sharing his gorgeous gifts with the rest of us.