The Lonely Letters

by Ashon T. Crawley

In The Lonely Letters, A tells Moth: “Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding.” But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley—writing as A—meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Theory, LGBT

280 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2020

Reviews

[Z]

I was gifted this book by a friend and ended up reading it at the very start of the pandemic lockdown. I was so glad I read it, especially when I did, and have such deep affection for the text. The multimodal nature of the text is stunning, the form and genre of the text is lovingly selected, and the movement through music, spirituality, blackqueerness, and affectation is deeply powerful. I very much love this text, and would really recommend it for folks looking to rest with the notion of loneliness in all its profusions.

[Pelumi]

This book has been my dear friend all through this late-pandemic year. It's been wonderful to read about the black queer experience in relation to black pentecostal music & culture, through all the frictions, tensions, moans and sighs. Painful and heartbreaking as well. If you're interested in sound studies, heartbreak, love & desirability, ascendance and the undercommons, do read!

[Sarah Jaffe]

Just a breathtaking book. A lovely practice of reading and thinking and writing otherwise, of loving so much it spills out onto the page. Beautiful.

[Michael Williams]

Magnificent and moving

This novel, with its discussion and digression and revisiting of the circular, cyclical nature of life and love, breathes with the power of a voice about to sing. Absolutely magnificent.

[Mills College Library]

289.94089 C9111 2020

[Robyn Luk]

quantum entangled to this book

[Ellen Moth]

gorgeous in a way that i can’t quite pinpoint ? really loved this book

[ketall]

Very interesting.

[Jacob Wren]

ashon t. crawley writes:

"And to be susceptible means a kind of porosity and that makes me think of air and breath and movements of inhalation and exhalation. One has to relax. Susceptibility and vulnerability together underscore the idea of existence as interstitial, as a circuit always waiting to be closed. This closure comes through friendship, which is another way to say sociality, another way to think vibration. The inventive impulse of friendship emerges from the fact that it is not institutionally informed or produced or protected. It’s not like marriage where there are ceremonies and rituals that people perform in order to enter into it, it’s not like marriage where there are institutions that give or withhold people’s capacity for engaging in the practice. Friendship is anti-institutional."