Available:
Store & Online
Product Info
Publisher: Canongate
Author: Kei Miller
ISBN: 9781838852825
Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Non fiction, Memoir
Things I Have Withheld
by
Kei Miller
Things I Have Withheld by
Kei Miller
Reviews
"A subtle, intimate yet hard-hitting investigation of – ostensibly – racism, class prejudice and homophobia … it doesn’t so much tackle as tease out – caress, even – the subject of things that are difficult to talk about"
The Times
Summary
In this astonishing collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit – the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.
Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women’s tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.
With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why – our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions – and those of the world around us.
