Description
Book SynopsisLinked stories alighting from a U.S., Black and Filipino imaginary through a central character Virgil, and his accounts on race, sex, and desire.
Virgil kills forms, manifesting a set of poetic investigations—revealing black and brown life, memory, dreams, the sea, the sex-act, the line. Virgil travels in theaters and lots: Manhattan, Guam, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, Berlin, Iloilo, Provincetown, Millington, San Francisco, Long Island, Western Mass. Virgil moves against class, whiteness, on stages, at lecterns, in studios, and a luxury vehicle. Virgil records in the sensorium of cruising lovers, real love, family, T.V., characters—“Butch,” “Stream,” “Clean”—his precise unfurling.
Trade Review"Artist, academic, and poet Wilson explores an artist’s identity and desire in this revelatory collection... Throughout, Wilson offers keen insights on tensions between corporeality and subjectivity, between the individual and socially constructed identity, and between dreams and reality. This adds up to a nuanced portrait of an artist mining his own life for material."—Publishers Weekly
"As the stories progress, readers get an intimate view of Virgil’s life and his impressions of sexual and governmental politics, race, identity, and how reality is perceived through the lens of societal constructs and expectations. Virgil’s episodic adventures flow with uninhibited prose and a keen sense of self."—Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter
"Moving from slumber to play to performance to life, Ronaldo V. Wilson blurs the realities that face this Black Filipino gay man, using them to establish a mirror. Mirrored in Virgil’s life are the experiences known all too well to those artists and dreamers who are queer and Black."—Greg Oletsa, ANMLY
"In Virgil Kills, Ronaldo Wilson leads us through a landscape of myths and dreams, desire and absurdity, with queer Black life always at its fierce center. This book shimmers with wit and brilliance."—Danzy Senna
"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."—R. Zamora Linmark
"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."—Roberto Tejada
Table of ContentsVIRGIL
Virgil Returns to Manhattan
The Dance
The Vent
The Conservation of Mass
Party, Party
The Wounded
Virgil Kills
The Operation
The After Party
Dream Vision in Blue and Black
Silent Incantations
CRITIQUE Virgil’s Findings
The Pieces
The Platform
The Conversation
Dream Collaged with Reality
The Releases
Virgil is a Conceptual Artist
Into the Future
The Greatest
Lost and Found
Virgil Discovers Waste
Basement
Competition
VESTIBULE Station
Crypt
Alright
Haunt
Pod
Demand
Coast
SACRA Fantastic
Structure
Eyed, Virgil
Virgil’s Going Home
LINEThe Fairmount
Among
Recall
Consequence
The Line
Staring
The Oasis
Virgil
Only
Dream
