seen from Greece
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Brazil
seen from Japan
seen from France
seen from Austria
seen from Belarus
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Switzerland
seen from Yemen
seen from Australia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
I spent an entire year on this porch in Mississippi watching a family of geese. They get to give. Over and over. They get to give. Their style of getting and giving are particular to each bird. But they give every single day. They share and accept sharing with grace and so much style. I'm working on this everyday of my life.
Kiese Laymon
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Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon
A coming of age memoir written in the second person to the author's mother. Kiese Laymon writes about many topics with a focus around his relationship with his highly educated and very pro-Black mother. He also discusses Blackness, his body issues, poverty, food insecurity, disordered eating, abuse, CSA, gambling addiction, sex, education, racism, and mental health. I read it after reading an Aubrey Gordon book, wanting more perspectives on fat experiences and was not disappointed. It's not a long memoir, but it is aptly named.
Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South
A Photographic Road Trip by Kate Medley ~ with Powerful Opening Essay by Kiese Laymon.
THANK YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN is the documentation of Kate Medley’s many road trips across the South photographing our service stations, convenience stores, and quick stops. Along the way, Kate pulls over for tamales, fried fish, and banh mi, but her images uncover the people and landmarks that supply far more than food and gas.
In an ever more divided America, these iconic gathering spaces provide unexpected community, generosity, labor, and creativity. Are these rural and urban pit stops the true “filling stations” of our time? In words and nearly 200 incredible images from the American South, Kate Medley shares her answers.
…bruises give you poetry, and we give you poetry, and you give we poetry, and loveliness gives you poetry, and first days give you poetry, and warnings give you poetry, and emergencies give you poetry, and bones, bones have no choice but to give us poetry. The trick is to accept what’s offered.
Kiese Laymon on Yrsa Daley-Ward, from bone
“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn't only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there, I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.”
-- Kiese Laymon, from Heavy
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Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either.
Kiese Laymon, Heavy
When was the last time knowing everything about something ended up good for you?
From Long Division by Kiese Laymon
Book #169 of 2022:
Long Division by Kiese Laymon
This 2013 authorial debut has some interesting ideas and a distinctive voice for its protagonist(s), but it strikes me as overall too jumbled and underdeveloped to land with much impact. The plot, as I understand it: a young Black teen in the modern age, struggling with potential queer feelings for his school rival / friend and having recently gone viral for calling out the racism of a spelling bee-like competition that kept giving students of color words that would be uncomfortable or stereotypical for them to repeat, stumbles across a book called Long Division. In it he finds the story of a boy with his same name in 1985, who winds up time-traveling to 2013, where he meets a girl who turns out to be his future daughter. She has the same name as a neighbor who’s gone missing in the reader’s reality… as well as a copy of a book called Long Division about a kid with his name going viral on the internet and so on. Later they go back to 1964 to try to save his grandfather from being lynched by the KKK.
The narrative alternates back and forth between these two people who are each fictional to one another, with context clues generally helping to identify the switch, but not always right away. It’s all a bit chaotic and unclear, especially for so short a novel (276 pages in paperback), and none of the characters ever seem to react to the patently weird stuff happening around them with anything but matter-of-fact disinterest. There’s a lot of unchallenged antisemitism, fatphobia, and homophobia including slurs, along with bizarre throwaway details like one of the heroes meeting a talking cat or the fact that his counterpart once pleasured himself while thinking about his grandmother. The whole project is frankly a mess, and often feels like an attempt to be provocative without necessarily demonstrating the substance or discipline to channel the ensuing attention productively.
I know that author Kiese Laymon’s more recent memoir Heavy has attracted rave reviews, and perhaps I should have started there. He’s still speaking from a specific southern Black perspective in this earlier work, but those #ownvoices insights are somewhat lost in the delivery.
[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, and gore.]
★★☆☆☆
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