Residual

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.

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.