Voice of the Fish

Lars Horn

• Publisher: Footnote Press
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781804440186
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'This book left me stunned. Breathtaking in its scope and generosity... We are in the midst of a transcendent talent.' Maaza Mengiste, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Shadow King 'Rapturous... [Horn] is the mystic's David Attenborough.' New York Times Book Review Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory memoir that explores the trans experience through meditations upon aquatic life and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak, read and write. In their adept hands, these poignant, allusive shards take shape as a unified whole: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries and antiquities serve as interludes between - and subtle reflections upon - longer memories of their life, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.Horn swims through a range of subjects; across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity and illness. From their childhood modelling for their mother's art installations - immersed in a bath with dead squid; encased in a full-body plaster cast - to their travels before they were out as trans, these beguiling fragments are linked by a desire to interrogate the physical, and to identify the current beneath. Horn re-examines presumptions about the body, privileging instead ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. Sensuous and immersive, Voice of the Fish is unique: a masterful and moving achievement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• In Water Disjointed from Me
• Last Night, a Pike Swam up the Stairs
• That Day the Haddock
• My Mother Photographs Me in a Bath of Dead Squid
• As for the Tilapia
• Last Night, a Doctor Handed Me a Glass of Water
• The Conviction of Things Not Seen
• Under the Fishes
• And the Fish in the River Shall Die
• The Georgian Military Road
• Last Night, Sturgeon Swam the Streets
• Speaking Reliquary
• What Manner of Land
• Judgement Run Down as Waters
• With the Moths’ Eyes
• Last Night, the Sea Spat My Body
• Ink
• Anything That Makes a Mark, Anything That Takes a Mark
• And the Lord Spake unto the Fish
• Last Night, the Moon Flooded the Bedclothes
• Tongue Stones
• I Am Poured Out Like Water
• Last Night, Eels Crashed from the Faucet
• Notes
• Acknowledgments