Historical Study & Educational Resources
![Kei Miller - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001JP804S.jpg)
Things I Have Withheld
In this moving and lyrical collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.
Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.
With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.
Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.
With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.
Readers Top Reviews
Philip Owende
Lived experience at best and very incisive on things that I have withheld myself!
Carol Levy
Everyone needs to read this book. There is a character in each story that will speak to you. You laugh and cry and find yourself nodding your head as you read. Thoroughly enjoyed this book!!
Creature
As a white Scottish male, if I could meet Kei Miller I'd shake his hand, hug him (with his permission obviously) and thank him profusely for teaching me so much, so gently, and letting me grow painlessly and without guilt as a human being who is beginning to understand what I've taken for granted all my life. Thank you Kei Miller.
Alexandra Mills
I almost didn’t buy this. I thought Kei Miller had finally written a new novel and was disappointed these were essays. Then I saw people raving about in on Instagram so i caved in. So happy I did! This is soooo good. I got goosebumps from the first essay, a letter to James Baldwin. I literally wept tears reading The Boys At The Harbour, and the final essay, another letter to Baldwin, is just devastating. These are essays about the black body, about sexuality and about silence and Miller writes with so much grace and wisdom.
Michelle M.
A phenomenal, beautifully crafted book of short essays — memoir and criticism — regarding the silences around race, sex, and gender. I highly recommend it.
