Virgil Kills

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.

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.