Award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the meanings of silence in this collection of provocative and lyrical essays
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. 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.
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, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.
Searing . . . entrancing . . . Miller brings into devastating clarity the dangers confronting Black people in visualising the final moments of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Sharp as blades, Miller's words cut to the core
