Ordinary Notes

These Black notes may land in silence or a tone, a sound, a pitch, a record, or an observation made with care; these notes might just reach you across distance, time, and space and with them you may be "held/and held."

Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes is a dazzlingly inventive and powerful exploration of Black life, art, language, beauty, and memory. Its more than three hundred notes collect into startling, rigorously constructed, beautiful layers, ranging across history, photography, and literature to attend to everyday Black existence. Sharpe's consideration of Black life's ordinary-extraordinary dimensions shape-shifts through her mother's aesthetic of beauty as a method, gathers entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable Blackness, and probes sites of memory and memorials.

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge from the ruins, forging a new literary form as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces. The result is a multiverse of immense care, feeling, and study.