Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay [Paperback]

Lars HornsVoice of the Fish,the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horns adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horns upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installationsmemorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squidto Horns travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of the body as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction,Voice of the Fishblends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.

Horn wants 'language and narrative to carry more physicality.'Voice of the Fishmeets this desire with a narrative that swells and recedes, with intimate depictions of the writers life as well as more distant tales of Pliny the Elder, a 100-year-old manuscript found in the belly of a codfilÃr