One of the things I think Thick does is it takes us seriously as readers. But I think a lot like Damon Young's book, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker - all of the essays in Thick can exist by themselves, but they become sort of like superheroes - like this collective essayistic superhero - when they're connected to essays preceeding and proceeding them. Tressie Cottam is one of the smartest people I will ever know – and I think is that rare essay collection where each essay is strong and surprising and it's like portals of entry. But I think what he shows us is that the interior - and if we use our interior to really kind of etch around what we see and explore have been told is inevitable - we can find something. And Marlon Peterson uses beautiful sentences to explore something that on the surface is not so beautiful. And I think sometimes we don't necessarily like to state that Black people deserve, among other things, beautiful sentences and innovative art. You know, you get talking a lot about what people deserve, what folks of color deserve, what Black folks deserve. And the thing that I really love about this book - and all the other books that I am talking about today - are that the sentences are so beautiful. And, you know, he really throws the traditional incarceration narrative on its head. Some years later, Marlon has turned this essay, called Bird Uncaged, into a book that explores, among other things, his experience coming here as a as a kid of a Trinidadian immigrants. I was an editor at Gawker maybe 7 years ago, and I published this essay by a young writer named Marlon Peterson about his time inside a prison and his relationships with the young people from his community who he met through letters.
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