September 1, 2023
Author of the essays collection This Is Major, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, poet/journalist Lawson takes us on a personal journey to find beauty and meaning in a fractured world. From a French castle to a charming gondolier in Venice, lost love in Mexico City, and a deep plunge into Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, it's a worldwide, whirlwind tour. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from November 1, 2023
A nonbinary, disabled, Black writer describes how travel has informed their journey to liberation. When prize-winning poet Lawson, author of This Is Major, was 39, a doctor told them they were dying. The author had just been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which caused them chronic pain. In reflecting on their ability to cope with the disease, Lawson writes, "getting healed for me has been about truly letting go, whether that means recovering from convention or from a chronic illness." To that end, each essay in this collection traces the author's path to letting go of something that held them back, as well as the role that place played in these transformational moments. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Lawson's interactions with their students led them to a greater understanding of their own gender and their ultimate rejection of binary thinking. In Bloomington, Indiana, their immersion in drag culture gave them the strength to divorce their philandering husband. In Maastricht, Netherlands, an elder's planned assisted suicide gave Lawson a new outlook on death and dying. In Venice, Italy, the author came to the realization that "we don't become beautiful until we believe it." At the same time, "knowing what you are worth makes you look at the world differently." Each revelation builds on the next, leading to the final two chapters in Los Angeles and Bermuda, where Lawson outlines their vision for communal healing. Packed with lyrical lines, genuine insight, and ebullient confessions, Lawson's latest nonfiction book sparkles with vulnerability, sincerity, and poetry. In addition to being masterfully structured, each essay interlocks with the next chapter with an intricacy that infuses the text with a rewarding sense of momentum. Lawson is a gifted chronicler not only of their own personal revolution, but also of the power structures that affect their place in the world. A stunning essay collection about travel, mortality, and liberation.
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January 1, 2024
In this travel memoir in 17 essays, poet and writer Lawson (This Is Major, 2020) explores identity and liberation, writing with lyricism about the experience of existing in a world that forces definitions upon individuals. They write about understanding and embracing their nonbinary gender identity and traveling as a female-presenting person. As a newlywed in the Netherlands, they worked with asylum seekers in a predominantly white rural area. They describe, in ""On Privilege,"" learning in childhood to respect one's host by eating the food they served and how this lesson allowed the author to connect with a woman who had fled from Liberia. ""On Dying"" introduces the careful approach Lawson's grandmother-in-law took to planning her own death. ""On Blackness"" describes ""the difference between [capital B] 'Blackness' and [lowercase] 'blackness'"" when considering culture, marginalization, and communication in Zimbabwe. Lawson hops across continents and eras of their life, with topics as personal as a difficult divorce and as vast as art history. The result is a memoir-in-essays that becomes a nuanced study of the complexity of existence.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
February 5, 2024
In this forceful memoir-in-essays, poet Lawson (This Is Major) shares the lessons they’ve learned from their travels across America and abroad. Lawson divides the book into 17 sections—“On Blackness,” “On Privilege,” “On Love,” “On Liberation,” and more—that range from Zimbabwe to Portugal to the American Midwest. The tone is predictably, though not excessively, poetic: “On Firsts” sees Lawson “attending” a Prince concert in Minneapolis from their mother’s womb, “just a thrum under the heartbeat,” witnessing “a black and brilliant world... a promiscuity that understands destruction.” “On Beauty” depicts Lawson’s nervous sexual awakening in Venice, Italy, describing how “having the language of beauty applied to me would leave me so terribly scared” when their gondolier boyfriend sang to them under their window. “On Dancer” is named for the dog who “poured into like no spirit had before,” helping them through their divorce from an unfaithful Dutch husband while they were living in Bloomington, Ind. No matter the setting, Lawson’s sentences astonish, and while the volume lacks a firm narrative through line, the author’s commitment to unsentimental self-examination is inspiring enough to sustain readers’ attention. The final product is both vivid and galvanizing.