Overview

T's first book, Szygy, Beauty, was a lovely and surprise success and grappled with a lot of the same issues of identity, sexuality, love, and loss. This book signals a more deeply considered and more narratively coherent approach, in line with both the author's and culture's shifting relationship to these issues. This book doesn't shy away from the inherent complexity involved in thinking about identity, community, gender, and the body, but instead tackles that complexity with inquisitiveness and surprising humor. In a moment when these ideas are at the forefront in the cultural and political discourse, it's the thoughtful and uncompromising examination of these issues that makes this book so special and important. T's joyful exploration of visual art will be embraced by anyone who cares for great critical writing about conceptual work. T is extremely active in the literary community, and their work will find a natural and enthusiastic audience among their peers at Essay Daily, Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, and any publication that champions narrative nonfiction.

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9781566895477

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Reviews

A perceptive and compassionate narrative that beautifully breaks with the limits of genre and gender. --Publishers Weekly Interspersing frank personal narrative with lyrical, line-broken passages from an unfinished meditation on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Fleischmann offers up pearls, pills, candies, and miniature portraits of their friends and lovers in acts of generosity that are self-questioning but never self-doubting. Rather, it's the notion of a unified self itself that splits and spills across these pages with honesty, empathy, and often stunning delicacy. --Barbara Browning To eat the candy; it's candy from Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres's 'spill' of wrapped sweets selected and arranged by the curator of the art museum in which it is displayed. In Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, this moment is protracted. It becomes both duration, the thing that varies time or stops it, and also a block of sensations that might be received by the reader and discharged by their own capacity to taste it too: 'The candy was very sweet, and it was melting.' T Fleischmann has written a book like this, one that is 'spilled and gestured' between radical others of many kinds. Is this love? Is this 'the only chance to make of it an object'? Is this what it's like to be here at all? To write 'all words of life.' And how intimate that is. A form of social privacy. Fleischmann: 'But maybe that's okay. Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what's already here.' Yes. It feels like that. It does. --Bhanu Kapil Praise for T Fleischmann How to describe the indescribable might as well be the title of this blurb, if we titled blurbs, since like any good essay, cowgirl, or wandering ghost, T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty is electric and resists being fenced in. Sometimes solid, sometimes not, like magma or the household magic of corn starch and water, Fleischmann works and perforates the spaces between body and nobody; desire, declaration, and dream; whiskey, sex, and subjectivity; art, ecstasy, and surface tension. Spectral and spectacular, Syzygy, Beauty will haunt you in a way you'll remember. --Ander Monson T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire. Its declarative sentences--seductive, abject, caustic, moving, informative, and utterly inventive--herald a new world, one in which we are blessedly 'here with outfits like strings of light and no future.' I hail its weirdness, its 'armpit frankess, ' its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music. --Maggie Nelson Let me say first that T Fleischmann's writing helps us see ourselves. Helping us see clearer what has been muddled in our lives is marvelous, and is the best possible endowment of strength. What better substance? Gluing fur to logic' as T writes. 'There is imagination in truth, ' and while T brands this an essay I sense it as poetry because I live through poetry. Whatever you call it, you too will be transfigured. Those who say reading a book changes nothing have been wasting their time reading the wrong things. Do you also know someone who says so? Send them this one. --CA Conrad, author of The Book of Frank A complex, tightly wound (and wounded) cri de coeur that is simultaneously accessible and intensely, cryptically personal. --Star Tribune In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann re-imagines the essay, creating a spare little book that reads like a collection of prose poems. Moving between anecdote and observation, fantasy and memory, it traces the story of a relationship--or does it? For Fleischmann, ambiguity is the point, and the more we read, the more the lines here blur. 'By describing something, ' [they write], 'we place it at a distance.' --Los Angeles Times

Both provocatively and evocatively written, the book illuminates the process of becoming. -Kirkus Reviews A perceptive and compassionate narrative that beautifully breaks with the limits of genre and gender. -Publishers Weekly Fleischmann is not only staking out but literally inventing a territory of their own. -Los Angeles Times This is a book about paying attention and sometimes failing to, about showing the ways in which attention, no matter how well focused, can be or feel insufficient. Fleischmann is not wringing their hands but instead leaning into the world, constantly pressing at the corners of language . . . Watchful of its context and position, this book is able to pose increasingly interesting, urgent, and difficult questions. It holds us accountable to the world. -The Paris Review Daily Fleischmann's path through self-expression, gender fluidity, and self-understanding is well worth our attention. -Literary Hub Chicago-based writer T Fleischmann melds personal narrative and art criticism in a poetically titled, genre-defying work. Mining the interactive art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, this book-length essay explores power, desire, gender fluidity and subverting limitations. -Chicago Tribune The long, sprawling essay bends prose and language to seek both intimacy and the alive body. -The Brooklyn Rail Meditative, beautiful, and revolutionary. -Book Riot With this book-length essay, T Fleischmann has given us a truly unique work...poetic, powerful, and subversive. -Ms. Magazine Interspersing frank personal narrative with lyrical, line-broken passages from an unfinished meditation on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Fleischmann offers up pearls, pills, candies, and miniature portraits of their friends and lovers in acts of generosity that are self-questioning but never self-doubting. Rather, it's the notion of a unified self itself that splits and spills across these pages with honesty, empathy, and often stunning delicacy. -Barbara Browning By turns blunt, confrontational, eloquent, exciting, original, and somewhat indescribable. -The Gay & Lesbian Review Non-fiction piled on top of an art critique balanced on photographs and spun around by poetry. -Columbia Journal Fleischmann blends their own experiences with the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to meditate on loss, violence, love and gender. -Chicago Tribune Fleischmann's book is also generous in its refusal to wrap up or resolve, leaving a wealth of inquiries to be pursued, an endless supply of thoughts feeding thoughts. -The Arkansas International To eat the candy; it's candy from Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres's `spill' of wrapped sweets selected and arranged by the curator of the art museum in which it is displayed. In Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, this moment is protracted. It becomes both duration, the thing that varies time or stops it, and also a block of sensations that might be received by the reader and discharged by their own capacity to taste it too: `The candy was very sweet, and it was melting.' T Fleischmann has written a book like this, one that is `spilled and gestured' between radical others of many kinds. Is this love? Is this `the only chance to make of it an object'? Is this what it's like to be here at all? To write `all words of life.' And how intimate that is. A form of social privacy. Fleischmann: `But maybe that's okay. Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what's already here.' Yes. It feels like that. It does. -Bhanu Kapil Praise for T Fleischmann How to describe the indescribable might as well be the title of this blurb, if we titled blurbs, since like any good essay, cowgirl, or wandering ghost, T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty is electric and resists being fenced in. Sometimes solid, sometimes not, like magma or the household magic of corn starch and water, Fleischmann works and perforates the spaces between body and nobody; desire, declaration, and dream; whiskey, sex, and subjectivity; art, ecstasy, and surface tension. Spectral and spectacular, Syzygy, Beauty will haunt you in a way you'll remember. -Ander Monson T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire. Its declarative sentences-seductive, abject, caustic, moving, informative, and utterly inventive-herald a new world, one in which we are blessedly `here with outfits like strings of light and no future.' I hail its weirdness, its `armpit frankess,' its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music. -Maggie Nelson Let me say first that T Fleischmann's writing helps us see ourselves. Helping us see clearer what has been muddled in our lives is marvelous, and is the best possible endowment of strength. What better substance? Gluing fur to logic' as T writes. `There is imagination in truth,' and while T brands this an essay I sense it as poetry because I live through poetry. Whatever you call it, you too will be transfigured. Those who say reading a book changes nothing have been wasting their time reading the wrong things. Do you also know someone who says so? Send them this one. -CA Conrad, author of The Book of Frank A complex, tightly wound (and wounded) cri de coeur that is simultaneously accessible and intensely, cryptically personal. -Star Tribune In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann re-imagines the essay, creating a spare little book that reads like a collection of prose poems. Moving between anecdote and observation, fantasy and memory, it traces the story of a relationship-or does it? For Fleischmann, ambiguity is the point, and the more we read, the more the lines here blur. `By describing something,' [they write], `we place it at a distance.' -Los Angeles Times

Interspersing frank personal narrative with lyrical, line-broken passages from an unfinished meditation on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Fleischmann offers up pearls, pills, candies, and miniature portraits of their friends and lovers in acts of generosity that are self-questioning but never self-doubting. Rather, it's the notion of a unified self itself that splits and spills across these pages with honesty, empathy, and often stunning delicacy. --Barbara Browning To eat the candy; it's candy from Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres's 'spill' of wrapped sweets selected and arranged by the curator of the art museum in which it is displayed. In Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, this moment is protracted. It becomes both duration, the thing that varies time or stops it, and also a block of sensations that might be received by the reader and discharged by their own capacity to taste it too: 'The candy was very sweet, and it was melting.' T Fleischmann has written a book like this, one that is 'spilled and gestured' between radical others of many kinds. Is this love? Is this 'the only chance to make of it an object'? Is this what it's like to be here at all? To write 'all words of life.' And how intimate that is. A form of social privacy. Fleischmann: 'But maybe that's okay. Even when imagining takes us away, it still begins with what's already here.' Yes. It feels like that. It does. --Bhanu Kapil Praise for T Fleischmann How to describe the indescribable might as well be the title of this blurb, if we titled blurbs, since like any good essay, cowgirl, or wandering ghost, T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty is electric and resists being fenced in. Sometimes solid, sometimes not, like magma or the household magic of corn starch and water, Fleischmann works and perforates the spaces between body and nobody; desire, declaration, and dream; whiskey, sex, and subjectivity; art, ecstasy, and surface tension. Spectral and spectacular, Syzygy, Beauty will haunt you in a way you'll remember. --Ander Monson T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire. Its declarative sentences--seductive, abject, caustic, moving, informative, and utterly inventive--herald a new world, one in which we are blessedly 'here with outfits like strings of light and no future.' I hail its weirdness, its 'armpit frankess, ' its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music. --Maggie Nelson Let me say first that T Fleischmann's writing helps us see ourselves. Helping us see clearer what has been muddled in our lives is marvelous, and is the best possible endowment of strength. What better substance? Gluing fur to logic' as T writes. 'There is imagination in truth, ' and while T brands this an essay I sense it as poetry because I live through poetry. Whatever you call it, you too will be transfigured. Those who say reading a book changes nothing have been wasting their time reading the wrong things. Do you also know someone who says so? Send them this one. --CA Conrad, author of The Book of Frank A complex, tightly wound (and wounded) cri de coeur that is simultaneously accessible and intensely, cryptically personal. --Star Tribune In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann re-imagines the essay, creating a spare little book that reads like a collection of prose poems. Moving between anecdote and observation, fantasy and memory, it traces the story of a relationship--or does it? For Fleischmann, ambiguity is the point, and the more we read, the more the lines here blur. 'By describing something, ' [they write], 'we place it at a distance.' --Los Angeles Times

Author Information

T Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty (Sarabande) and the curator of Body Forms: Queerness and the Essay (Essay Press). A nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and contributing editor at the blog Essay Daily, they have published critical and creative work in journals such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, and others, as well in the anthologies Bending Genre, How We Speak to One Another, Little Boxes, and Feminisms in Motion.

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