Virgil Kills

Linked stories alighting from a U.S., Black and Filipino imaginary through a central character Virgil, and his accounts on race, sex, and desire.

Virgil kills forms, manifesting a set of poetic investigations?revealing black and brown life, memory, dreams, the sea, the sex-act, the line. Virgil travels in theaters and lots: Manhattan, Guam, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Berlin, Iloilo, Provincetown, Millington, San Francisco, Long Island, Western Mass. Virgil moves against class, whiteness, on stages, at lecterns, in studios, and a luxury vehicle. Virgil records in the sensorium of cruising lovers, real love, family, T.V., characters??Butch,? ?Stream,? ?Clean??his precise unfurling.

List of contents

VIRGIL Virgil Returns to Manhattan
The Dance
The Vent
The Conservation of Mass
Party, Party
The Wounded
Virgil Kills
The Operation
The After Party
Dream Vision in Blue and Black
Silent Incantations
CRITIQUE
Virgil's Findings
The Pieces
The Platform
The Conversation
Dream Collaged with Reality
The Releases
Virgil is a Conceptual Artist
Into the Future
The Greatest
Lost and Found
Virgil Discovers Waste
Basement
Competition
VESTIBULE
Station
Crypt
Alright
Haunt
Pod
Demand
Coast
SACRA
Fantastic
Structure
Eyed, Virgil
Virgil's Going Home
LINEThe Fairmount
Among
Recall
Consequence
The Line
Staring
The Oasis
Virgil
Only
Dream

About the author

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose (Counterpath Press, 2014), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018); and two forthcoming books Carmelina, Figures: An Artist's Book (Wendy's Subway, 2021), and a book of stories, Virgil Kills (Nightboat Books, 2022). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is, too, a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside's Artsblock, Georgetown's Lannan Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University's Digital Media Center Theater, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. The recipient of fellowships from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), and Yaddo, and is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies).

Summary

Linked stories alighting from a U.S., Black and Filipino imaginary through a central character Virgil, and his accounts on race, sex, and desire.

Virgil kills forms, manifesting a set of poetic investigations—revealing black and brown life, memory, dreams, the sea, the sex-act, the line. Virgil travels in theaters and lots: Manhattan, Guam, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Berlin, Iloilo, Provincetown, Millington, San Francisco, Long Island, Western Mass. Virgil moves against class, whiteness, on stages, at lecterns, in studios, and a luxury vehicle. Virgil records in the sensorium of cruising lovers, real love, family, T.V., characters—“Butch,” “Stream,” “Clean”—his precise unfurling.

Foreword

Advance Reader Copies

Outreach to African American Media

Social Media Campaign

Virtual launch & tour

Additional text

"In Virgil Kills, Ronaldo Wilson leads us through a landscape of myths and dreams, desire and absurdity, with queer Black life always at its fierce center. This book shimmers with wit and brilliance."—Danzy Senna 
"Ronaldo Wilson’s kaleidoscopic and genre-defiant book of linked stories is an endless dream to behold. Like Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Wilson’s Virgil has an attitude and wit that sting like a thousand and one scorpions. He is a world-class traveler, a floater, a circumstance-and-perspective fluid artist and intellectual who doesn’t just break stereotypes—he slays them, so as 'to move forward, to offend in the face of casual and daily assault.' Mixing storytelling and criticism, he reminds us the myth of safe spaces and the history of, and ongoing, violations and violence on black and brown bodies, and that 'no one else’s story matters as he is making his.' Edgy, brazen, and poetically-packed, Virgil Kills revamps our outlook on race, sex, and class, and offers us new and interesting ways of reading and writing fiction."—R. Zamora Linmark

"A novel, a dream book, a study in self-formation, a concert of surface, sex, and underswell… Ronaldo Wilson’s ingenious Virgil Kills guides us, in the style of collage and choreography, through a netherworld where the 'the act of the body in the turns of its written emissions' can connect memory to the real and the fictive. Wilson’s portrait of Virgil—mixed-media invention; composite persona—is in equal parts riotous and intimate. In scenes of sexual acts, social kinship, family attachments, and racial marking; in narratives of loss, defiance, escape, and exile, Wilson refutes 'sorrow as the route to freedom,' defining what it means instead to render 'temperature and thought'—that is, to amaze, abrogate, and amplify the attributes of embodied life."—Roberto Tejada

Product details

• Authors: Ronaldo Wilson
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.06.2022
• EAN: 9781643621180
• ISBN: 978-1-64362-118-0
• No. of pages: 232
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Weight: 320 g
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / Asian American, FICTION / LGBTQ+ / Gay, FICTION / African American & Black / General, FICTION / Erotica / LGBTQ+ / Gay, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, Relating to African American / Black American people, FICTION / Asian American & Pacific Islander