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4.36 AVERAGE
4.36 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
tense
fast-paced
i am not the person who's opinion matters on this book, but kiese's way of writing is beautiful and i highly recommend reading his work
edit: im bumping my rating up to a 5 because i truly cannot stop thinking about this essay collection.
picked this up on the 4th of july because that really was the vibe, and i got chills as i finished this essay collection today. this felt less like an essay collection and more like a series of private letters that i happened to stumble upon because some are formatted exactly like that! kiese laymon is never trying to speak to anyone else other than his audience, whether that be his family members, or Black Southerners, and i think that it created this kind of specificity, love, and rage that can't be replicated. i sometimes feel when reading essay collections that the author has tried to fool me in some way by constructing the most perfect, poetic, and dexterous summation of american racism; and while this book is definitely poetic and dexterous, i don't feel like laymon is trying to portray himself or anyone really as unflinchingly noble and flawless. he lets people be the way that they are in all of their human goodness and badness. i think that that honesty is what resonated with me the most as someone who feels my own shortcomings in many ways. the essay for which this collection is named after truly blew me away.
picked this up on the 4th of july because that really was the vibe, and i got chills as i finished this essay collection today. this felt less like an essay collection and more like a series of private letters that i happened to stumble upon because some are formatted exactly like that! kiese laymon is never trying to speak to anyone else other than his audience, whether that be his family members, or Black Southerners, and i think that it created this kind of specificity, love, and rage that can't be replicated. i sometimes feel when reading essay collections that the author has tried to fool me in some way by constructing the most perfect, poetic, and dexterous summation of american racism; and while this book is definitely poetic and dexterous, i don't feel like laymon is trying to portray himself or anyone really as unflinchingly noble and flawless. he lets people be the way that they are in all of their human goodness and badness. i think that that honesty is what resonated with me the most as someone who feels my own shortcomings in many ways. the essay for which this collection is named after truly blew me away.
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Lemme use cliche, Kiese arrived like a comet in a literary landscape that to this day struggles to imagine readers that aren’t largely white women. His comet arrived some time in 2013, or ‘14, definitely by '15. A handful of his essays had been making the rounds online before the release of his two books. I remember an OKPer had shared the Gawker version of the essay, “How to Slowly Kill Yourself & Others in America” on those message boards circa 2010, and our anonymous handles were in awe of his skill and insight even then. Later, when I started my MFA program, a student Jamie Moore, made sure to preach the gospel of Long Division, and I became a "true believer." So many of us have been faithful members of his offerings partly due to Kiese being so present online, in particular via his Facebook. Yet, I wonder if our awe of Kiese’s brilliance, and how generous he is to many of us online: like revealing Baize was LDs narrator; sharing versions of Heavy before any of us knew it was Heavy; revising those ideas; and ruminating on everything from basketball, to who Baldwin was writing to, to Black death, to jokes about why hasn’t Nas rhymed on beat in 10 years, or the comedy of him sharing the Mexican version of the Heavy cover; if all those things at times don’t actually shield us from truly seeing the depth, complexity, and soul churning honesty of his work. We’re so enamored with the craft of his work, the perspective it illuminates, that we don’t get lost or reckon with the subtext. Well, lemme stop using “we,” and say I, in rereading, his republished collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself & Others in America, I was moved to stillness by how Kiese wrote raw parts of his life, family, community, and travels, but the raw felt like clouds or laying on grass. I had read every essay, except “Daydreaming with D’Andre Brown,” at least once, in the previous edition, or in all the magazines who had published Kiese’s work over the years. But this time, I don’t know, the sadness, the deaths, and the pain was much harder to read. What does it cost him to carry, to craft, to revise, to trust, in such a way that is so clean, clear, bright, funny, stank, lyrical, and fucn honest. The title essay, “You Are the 2nd Person,” “The Worst of White Folks,” “Echo…” and “Mississippi…” are just some of the finest compositions of any form composed on this stolen land. The fact that this edition also reads from the most recent essay he’s written to the oldest, feels like time traveling (again, echoes to Long Division). I think more fully due to his work, and ask more questions, pause and breathe more. But for real, can you imagine being this good at anything, and he’s done it 3x, technically five… All this in under 160 pages too. Brevity is clarity. We are all slightly better because of Kiese’s work, and I hope he can feel that, from my little section of L.A., or from wherever all readers of his work lay their heads. Like I said, off top: cliche(s). They work, sometimes.
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
In the author’s note, Laymon tells us about the fight it took to buy back his first two books from his original publisher. The shame that held him back, and the reckoning of giving too much of himself to people who never intended to do right by him. In those first pages, I was already hooked, already feeling a little attacked and a little hugged by those words.
I’m really moved by his focus on revision as an ethic, I think it’s my word of the year for 2025 - an extension of praxis, with an accounting for the shame that lingers in falling short. A reminder that you can start again, that you can revisit, and that repetition is the only path to improvement. I think there’s an important distinction in this approach, a required kindness that allows you time treat your present self not as a “before” to overcome, but a stepping stone in a life that is more cyclical than linear.
I respect the attention to the people who are passed over in the narrative - the people whose love and pain guided but did not save him. Essay collections can be harder for me to get into compared to more traditional chronological approaches, but I think this one works well. There’s enough repeated from beginning to end to put the puzzle pieces back together, and time to revisit earlier sections if you can’t.
I admire his reverence for his craft, his people, his family. It shows up literally - “I am a Black southern artist. Our tradition is responsible for me, and I am responsible to it” - but it would show up even if he never said it.
Read it all, ideally in one sitting or two back to back. I think a lot of people need to hear what Kai M. Green had to say (“please love me enough to tell me the truth), what Kiese’s mother had to say, what his grandmother had to say. There are lessons here that I think I needed to hear.
This book left me in stunned silence, scrambling to find my poetry notebook. Every essay ending hit like a gong in an empty temple, and everything between the endings was something I’ll be thinking about for months to come. God, and as an editor, the unimpressed thoughts I thunk about Brandon Farley… hwoooboy.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced