There are few books that have touched me as deeply as Ocean Vuong's first work "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous". In a letter to his own mother - who is illiterate and will never be able to read its contents - 28-year-old Little Dog tells his story of adolescence. He writes about growing up as the son of a Vietnamese-American immigrant, about the traumas that keep haunting his post-immigrant family, and about the attempt not to stand out as such in the city of Hartford, CT, and its rural surroundings. Slowly, his first gay love affair, in all its tenderness and harshness, comes to the fore. Little Dog's strength grows step by step from these experiences of his own vulnerability.
 
That Vuong has mainly written poetry so far is apparent in every line of the book. The language is breathtaking. Vuong manages to bring the meaning of the verbal itself into focus - the fragments, the unspeakable, but also the abundance of language from which our self-narratives and identities are formed.