In this moving and lyrical 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, defense mechanisms, imaginations and interactions, and those of the world around us.
"A wonderfully challenging book that I will dip in and out of for years to come. Through brilliant storytelling it explores issues of gender, queerness, race and class. Miller's insights and his grace are hard won. As always, this Jamaican rock-star poet's writing is lyrical, original and engaging. I left it challenged but tanked up with a new vocabulary and an understanding of the extent to which
