Welcome to Litsy!

A dazzlingly inventive, deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life. �I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.� �from �Note 18� in Ordinary Notes A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past�public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal�with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Through the striking images and words in these pages, themes and tones echo: sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature�but always attending, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author�s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. �I learned to see in my mother�s house,� writes Sharpe. �I learned how not to see in my mother�s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.� Using these and other gifts and ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,� collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a �Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,� and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.