THE DEAD DON'T NEED REMINDING

A queer Black poet reflects on death, history, and popular culture.

Although Randall, born to a Black father and Dominican mother, purportedly moved to Oxford, Mississippi, to pursue his MFA, he admits that he was actually there to track down the story of his great-grandfather, who “passed for white for a living” and was given 24 hours by a fellow citizen to leave with his family or be murdered. The search for his great-grandfather’s records frames Randall’s own struggle with suicidality, which peaked during a year when his anxiety about police killing Black people—and citizens documenting this death—made it impossible for him to pass his college classes. At the time, he was also suffering from knee and hip injuries that caused him chronic pain. To make sense of his trajectory as an artist battling the vagaries of the publishing industry and an Afro-Latinx man whose biracial identity is rarely acknowledged in mainstream media, Randall turns to popular culture, where shows like BoJack Horseman and One Day at a Time, movies like Creed, and musicians like Kanye West fueled his alternating faith in, fear of, and anger at the world. “I believe everyone has a year they never really leave,” writes the author. “I want you to feel the run-on sentence of the year that nearly killed me.” In that, he succeeds, offering an inventive, poetic, vulnerable, and sincere narrative. He has a particular gift for diction, layering standard and vernacular English at exactly the right moments to elicit sharply intelligent and deliciously surprising shifts in tone. Each piece not only stands out individually, but also forms an integral part of a clear character trajectory that pieces together the story of the author piecing himself together after generations of race-related trauma.

A brilliant essay collection tracing the lives of an Afro-Latino queer poet and his ancestors.