HEAVEN

In the first few pages of Heaven, Emerson Whitney writes: "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess--electrifying, gorgeous. In arresting prose, Whitney writes of moving through homes around the country, of transness, and, at the book's root, of their complex and often difficult relationship with their mother: their first window into understanding womanness and all that's bound up in it. Whitney streaks this through with queer and gender theory, standing audaciously in the face of uncertainty, to ask: "if the 'feminine' thus far has only existed as a defective version of a masculine idea, then maybe there's something living, like between the gap in the sidewalk, that is actual femininity, accessible to all." Whitney stands in the gap, writes in the gap. Heaven functions much like a hand-dipped candle, lowered patiently into theory and memory--a caught manta rays hanging aloft a dock, a mother checking her teeth in the mirror above the stove--that, taken together, thicken into an astounding, expansive examination of what makes us up. For fans of Eileen Myles or Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Whitney's Heaven introduces an important new public intellectual.