Review by Booklist Review
As an acclaimed poet and novelist, Miller (Augustown, 2017) has mined the history of his native Jamaica. This incisive collection of short essays serves as a tabernacle for stories untold, secrets, and reflections on race and sexuality. In "The Crimes That Haunt the Body," Miller confronts the memory of a conversation with his sister from years ago, in which he failed to understand why she refused to walk a mere 10 minutes alone at night: "there were things in this world that I could never fully understand because of my body." "The Buck, the Bacchanal, and Again, the Body" situates creatures from Caribbean folklore among the revelries of carnivals; "There is a feeling in the country called Carnival that a new kind of space exists, and the space is a generous one." Immediately arresting and consistently poignant, Miller's essays engage with the urgency of gripping fiction and the authenticity of stunning poetry. An important voice of the Caribbean, who should be read with the likes of Safiya Sinclair, Oonya Kempadoo, and Colin Channer.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jamaican poet and novelist Miller (Augustown) gives a searing voice to "the things I have been trying so hard to write" in this entrancing collection. In 14 essays that code-switch between personas and move from the incisive language of a university professor to Jamaican patois, he vividly depicts the ways colonialism, racism, homophobia, and privilege have shaped his life. As he writes in a letter addressed to the late James Baldwin, "there is little between... the set of circumstances you wrote of, and the set of circumstances we live in now." In "Mr Brown, Mrs White and Ms Black," a modern-day parable about the nuances of race, he chalks ethnicity up to being "not so much what you are, as... what people have decided you are." In "My Brother, My Brother," he witnesses the clash of whiteness and "brudda"-hood as a tourist poses for a photo in a historic slave dungeon in Ghana, while "The Boys at the Harbour" offers a glimpse of the struggles Jamaica's gay youth face and "this identity that has left so many of them homeless." Closing with another letter addressing Baldwin, Miller brings into devastating clarity the dangers confronting Black people in visualizing the final moments of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Sharp as blades, Miller's words cut to the core. Agent: Alice Whitwham, the Cheney Agency. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this collection of interconnected memoiristic essays by poet and novelist Miller (The Cartographer Tries To Map a Way to Zion), the writer's poetic brilliance immediately awes. He folds readers into the loud silence of the blank page, a paradoxical space of whiteness that can be both an invitation and a systemic, structural force that has stifled the voices of people of color for far too long. Miller is fearless, often invoking moments of diaristic honesty without ever sacrificing or shying away from critical commentary. The essays take readers to Miller's native Jamaica as he reflects on life in Kingston; to Trinidad, where he observes Carnival; to the United Kingdom and the United States, where he teaches writing. Miller excels at writing words that resonate with readers, making them feel able to join him in conversation and to truly listen to the voices meeting them sometimes shyly, sometimes boldly on the page. After reading, one hopes that we will change dominant narratives about certain stories and bodies. VERDICT With Miller's insight and verve in each essay in this rich collection, this unputdownable book will stay with readers long after they've finished.--Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Meditations on belonging, alienation, and the power of words. In 15 thoughtful and impassioned essays, prizewinning Jamaican novelist, poet, and essayist Miller reflects on race, gender, family, language, and, most pointedly, the body: "these soft houses in which we live and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying." As a queer Black man, Miller considers ways that bodies "can variously assume privilege or victimhood from their conflicting identities" and from the visceral reactions others have toward them. "Too often," he writes, "the meaning that my black, male body produces is 'guilty' and 'predator' and 'worthy of death' "--responses that he has encountered in the U.K., where he now lives and works as a university professor. But on visits to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana, where he thinks his body "should make a kind of sense," he is frustrated to find that "it doesn't make as much sense as I would like." In his home country of Jamaica, color--Black, White, and subtle gradations of brown--inflects daily life and self-perception. "When I talk about a place where our bodies make sense," Miller writes, "what I really mean is a place where our bodies are not seen, where they raise no questions, where they are not worth pondering." For Miller, though, race is not his only identifier: Immersed in the celebration of Carnival, he realizes that Jamaica is the place where he feels "most comfortably gay" because he knows "the language and the mannerisms of queerness. In Jamaica, I know how to dance. In Jamaica, I do not have to constantly translate my sexuality into mannerisms and speech and dances that sometimes feel to me, profoundly British." Many of these powerful appraisals of the body come in the form of letters to James Baldwin and Kenyan writer Binyaranga Wainaina, but Miller also offers musings on his family's secrets, portrayals of homeless gay and transgender boys, and questions of literary appropriation. A spirited collection from a significant voice of both fiction and nonfiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
