A sweet Southern sampling of a new generation of talented writers.
A collection of writers of color wrestling with the struggles and joys of living in a region rife with tension and possibility.
Edited by Barnes, a Charleston, South Carolina–based author who was raised in the Philippines, the book promises to document the American South “as big as it actually is,” refusing to engage with biased and flattened descriptions of the South that seek to portray a cultural homogeneity. The contributors, some emerging and some established, take on variations of the theme that readers may pull from Devi Laskar’s “Duos”: “I’m supposed to write about being a Southerner while simultaneously being a person of color. I’m somehow supposed to negotiate, on the page, how I have managed to be both at the same time for all of these years.” Fortunately, the roads taken by these authors are anything but rehearsed. In the wake of his critically acclaimed memoir, Heavy, Kiese Laymon digs into the complexity of race and class tension in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is a professor at the university. Soniah Kamal delivers a heartbreaking elegy for the loss of a child in Georgia. Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky, Joy Priest remaps her childhood through male-dominated Southern rap anthems toward feminine self-possession and mental mobility. Natalia Sylvester walks us through a lifelong history of doctor visits due to dysplasia of the hip. “My case turned out to be different,” she writes, “in the way that all bodies are different, in the way that science can often explain how but not why.” Not all the contributors are from the South; however, as the title suggests, they all lay claim to the ways they have come to feel “a measure of belonging” there. Across the collection, the writers push against the limits of what we think we know about the South.
A sweet Southern sampling of a new generation of talented writers.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-71-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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