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  • Things I Have Withheld

  • By: Kei Miller
  • Narrated by: Kei Miller
  • Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (14 ratings)

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Things I Have Withheld

By: Kei Miller
Narrated by: Kei Miller
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Publisher's summary

By acclaimed Forward Prize-winner, novelist, and poet, Kei Miller's linked collection of essays blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender.

In a deeply moving, critical, and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, award-winning writer Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept. Miller examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it - "to risk words, to risk truth; and through the body and the histories those bodies inherit" the crimes that haunt them, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics, and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a Black, male, queer perspective. An almost disarmingly personal collection, Kei dissects his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, literary criticism, culture, and storytelling.

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 innovation and beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why, "our actions, defense mechanisms, imaginations and interactions" and those of the world around us.

©2021 Kei Miller (P)2021 Canongate Books Ltd.
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What listeners say about Things I Have Withheld

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Masterpiece, moving...

I've never felt so surgically cut, understood and healed at the same time. Kei left me without enough words to express how this masterpiece made me feel. thank you.

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An intimate account of how we inhabit spaces

As if the veracity of the author reading their own work isn't evocative enough, the discourse around the very essence of what it means to be in the world hits just a little too close to anyone's home. The very contradictions that define us are also what oddly unify us. This collection of essays explores profoundly what it means to inhabit a body, a space, a culture, a time.

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great listen

Kei Miller never disappoints! The stories were interesting from start to finish. I always enjoy a writer's experiences when traveling around the world

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Excellent!!!

I was enthralled from the start and could not stop listening. To hear the author’s words expressed in his own voice was not only captivating but I felt a sense of fulfillment and pride. I cried, I nodded my head, i laughed; I was so sad when it ended and plan to listen again to the whole book tomorrow. I have to get anything he writes, I am amazed and I am a fan!

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