Hauntings • Print + E-book

Summary

In his debut collection of braided essays, Black queer writer, André Le Mont Wilson, examines the horror of racial trauma that haunts his family. “The places, names, and details change,” he writes, “but they are the same story.” From his mother’s home in Texas to his home in California, the specter of violence shapeshifts, following the Wilsons to a Halloween night, a school play, a commuter rail platform, and on. Hauntings hunts for answers that might dispel the terror: “Must we create new versions of the same old story to tell future generations? Can we tell a new story? Can we create a new ending?”

Details

• Selected for the 2022 Newfound Prose Prize
• Perfect-bound, risograph cover, 48 pages, 5″ x 7″, FSC-certified paper
• Purchase allows three PDF downloads
• Order print only
• Order e-book only

Praise

“I knew from the first line in Hauntings that I was about to read something so sharp, so visceral—so completely beautiful—that I was going to experience stories, lines, that would sing in me for the rest of my life. I was right. This collection of essays about life as a gay, Black man in the North speaking to his family’s and mother’s histories in the South—his own experiences sifting through records, a gun suddenly at his back—lifted me into another world. Make no mistake. Andre Le Mont Wilson is a powerhouse of a writer, and this collection is just the beginning.”
        —Erika T. Wurth

“A searing prophetic voice of the American Uncanny, André Le Mont Wilson traverses a multiverse of race, sexuality, and difference, pulsating across our collective memoryscape. In Hauntings, we behold W.E.B. DuBois’s Veil and Sorrow Songs remixed and fast-tracked for the #BLM era, even as these sparse, taut essays wormhole us back into the ancestral Dreamtime of lynchings, casting their spectral shadows over the national family album. At the heart of these interlinked narratives stands the remarkable figure of Wilson’s late mother, whose dream diaries continue to speak to him and all of us as a shining light through the Valley of Darkness. Here is prose-poetry that is simultaneously tragic and life-restoring, beckoning us towards a Promised Land of justice and hope that remains, against all odds, as expansive and high as the listening skies.”
        —Mark Auslander, author of The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family

Author

André Le Mont Wilson is a Black queer poet and writer who works in Oakland, California, teaching storytelling and writing to adults with disabilities. His poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Quiet Lightning, Mom Egg Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Litro Magazine, Rattle, Sun Magazine, RFD Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets Journal.

Artwork

Cover by Cloud Cardona.