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Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay

  • Book
  • Jun 7, 2022
  • #Essay #LGBTQ+
Lars Horn
@LarsHorn
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
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4.16/5 83 ratings
1 Recommender
1 Mention
1 Collection
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,... Show More

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.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 240

ISBN: 1644450895

ISBN-13: 9781644450895

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Laura Sackton @laurasackton · Dec 15, 2022
  • Curated in THE BEST LGBTQ+ BOOKS OF 2022
This breathtaking collection of interlocking essays explores gender and transition, illness and disability, art, water, memory, and the act of reading and writing. Horn writes beautifully about so many things: swimming, the art of tattooing, traveling, masculinity, childhood. But their writing is always grounded in the physical reality of the body: what it’s like to live in a trans body, a gendered body, a body that is visible to others, a body that is not visible to others. They play with form, interspersing longer lyric essays with short lists that utilize quotes, imagery, poetry, and recollections. This is queer writing at its best — a beautiful example of just how inventive and world-opening essays can be.
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