GLR March-April 2023

and continued by someone else, only Barton has played it by himself over time, and gone in whatever new direction the line seemed to take him on any given day. Unfolded, the scrolls bring to mind the legend of one of Barton’s Beat contempo raries: Jack Kerouac typing On the Road on a long roll of paper so he wouldn’t have to stop and risk interrupting the flow. Writing a Chrysanthemum teems with intense, mysterious feeling. There’s something unhinged about the work (one of

Barton’s benefactors called him “crazy as a bedbug and impos sible to cope with”) that is both bizarre and intriguing. It defies the norms we know, as does Barton, who considered himself not an artist but a writer. The artist Etal Adnan, whose writing is excerpted in the book, likewise felt that Barton’s sketchbooks were “not meant to be grasped in a single vision like a painting, but rather to be read, visually, in sequence, like an ordinary book that you cannot read in a single glance.”

Reclamation and Recovery

A UTHOR LARS HORN writes in Voice of the Fish : “Past a cer tain age, my own reflection be came increasingly difficult to look at. So, I didn’t. I looked out. Around. t others. Animals. Trees. Anything not myself.” Looking outside themself—the author uses they/them pronouns—is one of the primary ways in which Horn makes this

disguised, encountered, and accounted for. Their natural inclination to gravitate to everything male—“As a child, I screamed if anything female touched my skin. I at tended boys’ youth groups, played on boys’ sports teams”—was stifled after puberty. “I knew myself better at six, at eight, at ten, than I did at eighteen, twenty-three. Only in my late twenties did I return to a self I

T HOMAS K EITH

VOICE OF THE FISH A Lyric Essay by Lars Horn Graywolf Press. 240 pages, $16.

lyric essay, as the book is aptly subtitled, a superb achievement. Along with autobiographical memories, Horn offers signposts in the form of stories, references, and quotations from a wide range of sources. What they have to do with Horn’s life isn’t ob vious at first. In time, they form the structure upon which the au thor builds and shapes their discoveries about who they are, or at least who they may be at any given time. This book-length essay consists of observation and epigraph as intimate history. The in terpolations create breaks and rhythmic shifts that serve as intel lectual context for the personal narrative. They divert our gaze away from Horn toward poetry, history, theology, myth, and sci

had asphyxiated for over a decade. When you’ve ... actively en couraged something within you to die, suffocate ... it takes time to resuscitate a self, a life you’ve endeavored to forget.” The process of reclamation began after Horn attended uni versities in Edinburgh, Montreal, and Paris, and then traveled and worked in Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Strangers experi enced Horn in ways that ranged from indifferent or knowing to disconcerting and dangerous, all of which further informed their self-understanding: “A child pointing at me as I shower: ‘What is it?’ The mother: ‘It’s a woman, there are lady parts.’At a new job: ‘Is it a man or a woman?’” In 2014, Horn tore a muscle in their shoulder while weight lifting, which led to a complete and mysterious physical shut down. At the nadir of the illness, Horn, bedridden, could not speak or read for six months. The vast web of associations gath ered by the author underpins their attempt to understand the journey from invalid to a new normal. Most of the myths and scientific information relate in some way to fish and water. The sources range from ancient Egypt, Greece, China, and Japan to Catholic saints, literature, history, and scientific discoveries. In many a fish tale, whether conveyed in anecdote, aphorism, or prose poem, it is the water that dic tates how a fish is understood, valued, used, or mythologized. Horn revels in the mystery of life by embracing its ambiguity and complexity. The contradictions and contrasts in this essay are what prevent it from being a polemic or an inspirational memoir. Few dots are connected or conclusions drawn. Horn is an amiable and generous guide who doesn’t make ideological demands on the reader. Sometimes a fish is just a fish. The strength of Horn’s structure is apparent in their re counting, over the course of twenty pages, a thwarted but dev astating physical assault they experienced on a pre-dawn London street. Horn begins with legends of St. Lucy and her iconography as patron saint of sight, blindness, light, and dark, whose dismembered eyes witness acts of evil. Then, intertwin ing brief descriptions of the attack, there are short prose poems,

ence, always bringing the reader back to the author’s thorny experience of self. Horn, who identifies as queer and transmasculine, was raised by a woman who was a conceptual artist first and a mother second. Frequently mistaken for a man, their mother “drank hard, laughed hard, spoke hard,” and had possibly one of the most sobering re

Lars Horn

sponses ever to a child coming out: “Fucking finally,” she said. “Thank God we don’t have to play along with that anymore.” Functioning as an artist’s tool or an object, Horn’s body was regularly incorporated into their mother’s installations. Among other things, she used Horn as a model for full-body casts, and there was a memorable occasion when she photographed Horn holding their breath, eyes open, in a bathtub full of dead squid. A fascination with acts of creation is just one of many threads that Horn weaves through their meditations about the body as a liminal object, a thing outside oneself to be assessed, decorated, Thomas Keith is the author of Robert Burns’s Life on the Stage (2022).

The G & LR

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