You must be careful. Your voice, the tones it makes, it sounds so strong, as if it could never go away. But it might, all at once, without warning. - Alexander Chee

The weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark in me retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe. I was still me — the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling haunting me then didn't reach me. Which is one of the things that love can feel like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may have fallen asleep at some point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can't reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world.

There’s some way of thinking about how the body can be articulate that translates into how you tell stories on the page. I don’t know if it goes the other way. I’d love it if it did. The body is the instrument for the essayist in particular. It’s the instrument by which the events are recorded; it’s the instrument on which the events are replayed. It’s a very complicated, interdimensional relationship we have with our bodies when we’re nonfiction writers.

A collection like a circus of daredevils, but with the determined charm of a Chinese drag queen making her home in Iowa. Siasoco takes us on a trip through the world we know by way of characters I've not seen in fiction before, or at least, not enough of — characters with stories I have been waiting for. A bravura debut.