Title:
Voice of the fish : a lyric essay / Lars Horn.
ISBN:
9781644450895
Personal Author:
Publication Information:
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2022]
©2022
Physical Description:
232 pages ; 22 cm
Awards Note:
Honor book for the Stonewall Book Award, (Nonfiction / 2023)
Contents:
In water disjointed from me -- Last night, a pike swam up the stairs -- That day the haddock -- My mother photographs me in a bath of dead squid -- As for the tilapia -- Last night, a doctor handed me a glass of water -- Conviction of things not seen -- Under the fishes -- And the fish in the river shall die -- Georgian military road -- Last night, sturgeon swam the streets -- Speaking reliquary -- What manner of land -- Judgement run down as waters -- With the moths' eyes -- Last night, the sea spat my body -- Ink -- Anything that makes a mark, anything that takes a mark -- And the Lord spake unto the fish -- Last night, the moon flooded the bedclothes --- Tongue stones -- I am poured out like water -- Last night, eels crashed from the faucet.
Summary:
"Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn's upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installations--memorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squid--to Horn's travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of "the body" as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all." -- Amazon.com.
Personal Subject:
OCLC Number:
on1264275609
Availability:
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