Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

A singular achievement,Ordinary Notesexplores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that gather meaning as we read them, ChristinaSharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Through the striking images and words in these pages, themes and tones echo: sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature but always attending, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart ofOrdinary Notesis the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. "I learned to see in my mother's house," writes Sharpe. "I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words." Using these and other gifts and ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method," collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a "Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness," and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial.And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.(From Knopf Canada)

• 70 works of Canadian nonfiction to check out in spring 2023
• Christina Sharpe reflects on the complexities of Black life through a new literary form

Christina Sharpe is a Toronto-based writer, professorandCanada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. Her previous book,In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was named one of the best books of 2016 by The Guardian, and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Interviews with Christina Sharpe

The Next Chapter18:37Christina Sharpe on Ordinary Notes

Christina Sharpe talks to Shelagh Roger about her book, Ordinary Notes.