Residual - by Tisa Bryant (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Writing alongside the specter of premature death, Tisa Bryant traces the contours of Black women's interior lives and domestic spaces through meditations on literature, cinema, installations, and archival research to reaffirm her own way of being.

In the long aftermath of her mother's death, Tisa Bryant's Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother's everyday life asking, what else is an archive--a bookshelf, a dresser drawer, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories and impressions as well as archives of renowned Black women, who also died prematurely, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Bryant's hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, intention, impressions, and failure in the wake of loss.

Review Quotes

"Tisa Bryant does not merely write across genres; she stretches them, the boundaries between memoir, criticism, and theory pulled taut until they give way to something radical and uncontainable, propelled by an intellectual urgency that is both fierce and formally inventive."
--Rosa Boshier Gonzalez, Gulf Coast

"Fifteen years after her mother's death, Bryant attempts to confront the emptiness and loneliness she felt in the wake of the loss... through captivating writing that hovers between prose and poetry, Bryant paints a moving portrait of grief."
--Publishers Weekly

"A meditative, soulful, and deeply moving tribute. In Residual, I recognized diaspora's shatter--the silence, the laughter, and the secret knowing that passes between mothers and daughters. This book is an inventory and an altar."
--Lara Mimosa Montes

"Enigmatic, powerful essays address Bryant's work to come to terms with her mother's life and death."
--Kristen Rabe, Foreword Reviews
"Tisa Bryant is, quite simply, an icon. Her work lives not on my bookshelf but on an altar of formative texts as cherished, to me, as Toomer, Rilke, and Carson. In Residual, she grieves her mother as though solving a mystery, creating a portal that is also a museum, an account of her own becoming, aliving, breathing stage set. The pages are haunted by authors and artists across space and time, a presence that is not, as she writes, "an academic affair," but a kind of lighting, longing, and music that enlivens the walls and corners of Bryant's interior world."
--Aisha Sabatini Sloan

"Tisa Bryant unmakes and remakes diasporic attachments, offering a poetic genealogy that is animated by flowers, perfumes, chrome furnishings, wide plank floors, plush sounds and song. Within, moments of incredible loss are knitted to faded familiarities, disintegrated papers, Cicely Tyson, laughter, trouble. Residual is a wonderful spatial experiment."
--Katherine McKittrick

About the Author

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on Black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborates with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book series of visual mixtape love letters to black people and black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has written for shows and catalogs for artists Jacob Mason-Macklin, Cauleen Smith, Laylah Ali, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, among others, and has work forthcoming in Brink. She is an assistant professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.