Genre-bending books have greatly influenced my own work. I’ve written about my mother’s self completed death in a new memoir called O Mother, out with McSweeney’s on September 1. In it, I used the diagnostic material about my mom I’d found after her death, my own diagnostic material that was filtered in with hers–ADHD, Autism, CPTSD, Ehlers Danlos, all of it we shared–as well as pieces of ephemera, notes about her arrest preceding her death, and my baby book, which was a journal of her being my mom that I was meant to open only when she was no longer here. I just never thought it would be so soon. The language of bureaucracy often is the language that speaks for our most marginalized. The books on this list are all ones that wrest humanity back from this language. I hope my book does the same.
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Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel
Weigel, a Dene/Métis writer writes within and between treaty documents, land scrip records and his grandmother’s enfranchisement file in order to fulfill this purpose: “This book began as thoughts on treaty and my obligations to the land in this time. But it spiraled outward into a journey of understanding of all my relations.”
Nox by Anne Carson
A unique elegy: fragments, poems, family photos, torn letters, and stamps, accordion out from a box that’s meant to hold Carson’s grief for her late brother. Anyone who’s grieved knows these boxes. I relate so deeply to the process of going through the printed matter of a loved one. It’s very cool that Carson manifests this.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
Hartman turns to the case files, court records, and photographs used to surveil and criminalize Black women in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York and then writes against those records’ intentions. Through what she calls “critical fabulation,” she imagines these women’s interior lives in vivid, speculative detail, powerfully refusing the flattening logic of the archive that recorded them.
Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
Philip’s book length poem is a tremendous feat. Built entirely from the language of Gregson v. Gilbert, a one-page legal document from a 1783 case that dryly records the tossing over of cargo for insurance money, the “cargo” is human people, enslaved Africans who were murdered. She fractures and scatters the document’s legal language across the page in an act of art and prayer, nothing less than an ancestral evocation. I couldn’t recommend more highly attending a reading of Zong! with M. NourbeSe Philip if ever possible.
Bough Down by Karen Green
Written after the death of her husband, David Foster Wallace, by self-completed death, Green’s book moves in short prose-poem fragments interspersed with collage, piecing together grief in real time rather than narrating it after the fact. It’s an intimate, unsparing record of the ordinary and unbearable details that follow a sudden loss, pill bottles, static, half-finished sentences, are assembled the way memory actually works.
NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field by Billy Ray Belcourt
Belcourt’s poems catalog the strategies, irony, sex, tenderness, theory, humor, that make survival possible under ongoing settler colonial violence. The collection reads like a living archive of what it takes to keep a queer Indigenous life liveable, refusing both despair and easy resolution.
Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis
The collection’s centerpiece, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” is a found poem stitched entirely from the titles, catalog entries, and museum descriptions of Western artworks in which a Black female figure is marked present, spanning tens of thousands of years of art history. Lewis upends the language of representation collected from the cataloging of the Black body, and refuses to land or hold down what it surfaces.
The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert
Drawn from over twenty years of Guibert’s private diaries, this book moves through desire, friendship, illness, and mortality with startling candor, written with no thought of eventual publication. Its fragmentary, undated entries resist the shaping hand of memoir, offering instead something more raw: a private archive of a life, left open for the reader to enter uninvited.
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O Mother by Emerson Whitney is available from McSweeney’s.
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