January Reading: A Knife in the Heart of Being Known

James Baldwin, Canisia Lubrin, David Wojnarowicz, and others

Naturally, I begin the year haunted.

Grey Dog (ECW Press) by Elliott Gish followed me from the last days of 2024 into the first of 2025. I’d been intentional with the books I brought home from my last trip overseas, particularly on the first rung of my journey — they’d needed to survive a transatlantic crossing before coming home. I let myself have one book at Trident Booksellers & Cafe, and this was it: a lesbian historical horror by a Halifax author. Gruesome phenomena attend a schoolmistress’ crepuscular descent into madness (or is it an ascent into enlightenment?) and I found myself lingering, as I often do, on the the descriptions at the borders of plot, the way the trees reach down to meet one, the quality of the frost, the steam the viscera must have left, lingering in the fresh snow. I understood the heroine, Ada’s, desire to be taken, not only by the grey dog, but by the landscape that seems to invite one to its breast, more needfully than any living man.

I had gotten to the new year, and found it afire. It dawned on me anew, as it had more than once during the hundredth year of his birth last year, that I had somehow flounced through life without reading any James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room (Penguin Modern Classics) was one of three books I’d bought in late 2024 in Housmans Bookshop, a not-for-profit political N1 London bookseller in whose stacks I spent at least an hour poring after having a coffee with the astonishing, wondrous poet Ella Frears. One January day into night, I curled up in my Tunapuna apartment with Giovanni and tea, and across the span of slow hours, unravelled. What to say other than it should never have taken me this long, that I’m glad I finally have begun with Baldwin, and that it was probably always going to be Giovanni’s Room first. What I think I want you to know most about this novel, if you haven’t read it yet, is that it’s not about being good or virtuous, it is about being utterly fucked, and reprehensible, and in that estimation neither more or less capable of cowardice than most of us are, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.

“Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them: in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.”

from Giovanni’s Room

This book is a devastation, and a necessary one. As I told my partner,

“It reminds me that... hm. I was not put here on this earth to be okay. You know? Not that I was put here to be miserable, I don't mean that. I mean I was put here to feel things to the marrow. To report on them, with a matching sense of urgency. Then to die.”

I’m running out of David Wojnarowicz books, because he, having done his urgent work, has long been dead. So much of the time I spend thinking of David is in imagining the more work he’d done, had AIDS not taken him. The Waterfront Journals (Peninsula Press) I must have acquired at The Strand, though I cannot remember in which year; two of their busily-patterned bookmarks fell out when I picked the book up from my shelves. These are fact-fiction-blurring first-person anecdotes, pulled root-wise from the lives Wojnarowicz either encountered, extrapolated, or lived himself, and the most flat, one-dimensional question we might ask of them is, “Did they really happen just like this?” I realize I have not tabbed the vignette that disturbed me the most, “A Kid on the Piers Near the West Side Highway”, a violence of assault that bleeds and hyperventilates and cries. Nothing in his bibliography so far has touched Close to the Knives for me, but I don’t ask it to do so. I’m just that grateful to have this much of David, documented on the earth that so roughed him up.

A Hundred Lovers (Knopf) by Richie Hofmann was my January book of poems. In my Dear Poems project, presently sidelined but never far from my heart, I wrote to “Blue Anther”, one of the poems in this collection. Richie’s are not poems I wish I could write. They are a better, truer thing — a series of places I best recognize through alarming and urgent sensation, a gathering of sites I’ve never been and might never, except for the coursing of appetite, the pinprick-stab of cruelty, the eros of a bruised, bitten mouth. I got to the final page of A Hundred Lovers and felt, with real indignation, that I had not had enough.

The book of January that held me, disassembled me, and took me most urgently from myself into what I should be, what I hopefully am in another imagining, was Code Noir (Knopf Canada) by Canisia Lubrin. It is very important to say that this book is not ready to be gentle with you. It is crucial to tell you this book is rooting, Issa Rae styling, for Everyone Black. I’m still living in how Code Noir showed me beyond the questions I have most conditioned myself to ask about narrative, about the linearity and fit-into-placeability I have positioned upon it. I am made over, retranslated out of my skin, by the fact that I thought I understood visionary before Canisia Lubrin. I did not. I had not. I may not until she wheels and comes again with her next bombtrack. You will want to get with this if you have a care for the anger of the world we are inhabiting. If you care about legislatures as they have been defined by those with power, before our time and in the here and now. If the place is burning down, as it often feels to me like it is, then thank fuck I have Code Noir to usher me to the pyre.

All photographs were made at ARC Co-Create Hub with the luminous ishara.