Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

In this astonishing collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit – the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.

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.

With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, 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.

Publisher Review

A wonderfully challenging book that I will dip in and out of for years to come. Through brilliant storytelling it explores issues of gender, queerness, race and class. Miller's insights and his grace are hard won. As always, this Jamaican rock-star poet's writing is lyrical, original and engaging. I left it challenged but tanked up with a new vocabulary and an understanding of the extent to which so much is inscribed on the body -- INGRID PERSAUD * * Observer * * Invaluable . . . an astounding collection, where Miller circles the question of how to put words to what is often silenced . . . In a lyrical, effortless style, Miller traverses questions of class and race, and how love, privilege and community exist within them * * Big Issue * * The powerful essays include [Miller's] own letters to the late American novelist James Baldwin and his reflections on the permanence of racism. He writes movingly * * Independent * * Miller promises a lyrical collection of essays . . . Drawing on his travels across the US, the UK, Jamaica and other places, Miller's essays say something about the ways in which meaning, as well as our own positionality, can shift as we travel through the world and encounter systemic violence . . . Both Miller and Baldwin are known to be devastatingly concise and honest in their observations concerning race and racism * * Forbes, Most Anticipated Book of 2021 * * Miller's storytelling is impeccable, and his verse is arresting and beautiful. Things I Have Withheld is a remarkable contribution to literature -- DE'SHAWN WINSLOW * * author of In West Mills * * Perfectly encapsulates what it means to live in today's world as "the other" . . . Miller is a gifted writer; his silences furthering his craft as much as his words . . . Miller's writing is courageous and expansive. It seeks to educate its readers about inherent racism and racial bias and does so by tackling nuances head on * * Wee Review * * 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 * * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * * A stirring and insightful collection of essays . . . Miller is able to bring us a persuasive, writerly account of what is going on in some of these places he inhabits * * Tears in the Fence * * Shamefully, the stream of consciousness of a Caribbean philosopher, as I humbly designate Miller to be, is rarely considered essential literature in Western academia. Miller is a Jamaican-born poet, essayist and novelist tantamount to Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Orlando Patterson and Claude McKay * * BOMB magazine * * Praise for Kei Miller: An expansive talent, of a writer stretching to catch up with his own curiosity and fertility * * New Yorker * *