A History of My Brief Body

Each book, each poem, each story is against the trauma of description, those ways of reading and listening that make vampires out of people, possessed by an insatiable hunger for a racialized simplicity that makes us into objects of study to be fed through the poorly oiled machines of analysis.

I can't really rate this because it's mixed. I have a high tolerance for – even a love for – discursiveness, opaqueness, and density. . . but parts of these felt like a literary theory dissertation making claims about ontologies and futurities and that's not for me. (Not everything is made precisely for me and my enjoyment, shockingly.) As a general rule, the less tethered to his personal life and experiences his writing became, the less I enjoyed it. And I really didn't get his argument that the aesthetic function of fiction is to “to whisper, to hide critique” – he really didn't elaborate on that beyond to write vaguely and poetically about it. Idk, that one bugged me.

Again, the closer to his lived life it was, the more I liked it. The last essay in particular, “To Hang Our Grief Up To Dry,” is absolutely chills-inducingly beautiful.