![]() ![]() ![]() The real heads, of course, as this brilliant collection of word paintings displays, can be on anybody’s bodies. In Whisper to a Scream, Raina feels safer in her ASMR videos. ![]() In Suicide, Watch, Jilly leans on her online Facebook community as she drops hints of her coming suicide. Thompson-Spires, thankfully, depicts a wide range of people, not seeking either overwhelmingly positive or negative images of a race but capturing diversity - reality - in much of its multifarious beauty and terror. In Heads of the Colored People, we see just how dynamic relationships can be, both in person and digitally. Not all of Thompson-Spires’s stories are overtly satirical, and they become progressively more serious as the collection progresses, but a thread of outrageous, glaring self-awareness runs through the collection, granting even many of the more severe tales a tone of dark comedy. Thompson-Spires’s metafictional satires, oriented around questions of blackness, join a particular tradition of African-American fiction, recalling the sardonic absurdism of Everett’s Erasure and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, among others. Clever, cruel, hilarious, heartbreaking, and at times simply ingenious, Thompson-Spires’s experimental collection poses a simple, yet obviously not-simple, question: what does it mean to be a black American in this day and age?. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |