Thot, Chanté L. Reid
Reckon, "Black Joy: 2022 Best of Books"
Thot is a ground-breaking, fast-paced, book-length essay that experiments with poetry, dialogue, and memoir. At its epicenter are two competing forces. One is Chanté’s upbringing in the splendor, density, rhythms, and madness of the Bronx, NY, including the murder of Chante’s neighbor, Deborah Danner, killed by a police officer during his break-in. The other is Reid’s academic life at Brown University, where she is completing a critical thesis on Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved. Its characters—Sethe, Denver, Margeret Garner—wind in and out of the conversation, as do the Medea and Narcissus of Greek myths. Thot is a thrilling cacophony, a highly original mix of genre and voice, sure to please readers in search of something startling and new.
Additional Info
Chanté L. Reid is a writer from the Bronx, New York. She holds writing degrees from both Brooklyn College and Brown University, and has been an adjunct instructor up and down New England.
PRAISE FOR THOT:
"[E]xperimental, poetic, and confident...A boundary-pushing book-length essay perfectly suited to literary scholars."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Reid mixes memoir, poetry, and close reading in her innovative debut....Both poetic and blunt...it makes for an illuminating record of a mind fascinated by literature in a world of violence. This original essay marks Reid as a writer to watch."
—Publishers Weekly
"This book-length essay might be called Thot, but it will get your thoughts going. On Reid’s mind is what’s been on most of our minds these past few years: community, police violence, mental health and Toni Morrison–okay, that last one may just be me because I always have Morrison on the mind. While the subject matter might be heavy, the writer’s wordplay, pacing and line breaks will keep you engaged as Chanté brings us from her beloved Bronx to Beloved and back in less than 100 pages."
—"2022 Best of Books: Our Top 5 Must-Reads" by Minda Honey, Reckon
"From the first sentence to last, Chanté Reid’s Thot adorns edges and margins—of other texts, of found stories, of the overheard, rumored, interpolated—all while enacting how any word slips, decentered, refined, into an overlapping, a new way of reading. To reflect, to be an anti-vampire vampire, to relay a variety of tragedies while firmly in humor’s grace—there aren’t enough near-words for the sting and salve of Reid’s inventive authorship. There are a million ways to say how much I love this book.”
—Thalia Field, author of Personhood, Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction, and Bird Lovers: Backyard
“Thot by Chanté L. Reid is both a brilliant hybrid engagement with one of world literature's very greatest novels and an extraordinarily moving reflection that not only describes but also embodies the complex matrix of forces that have crackled their way through her 21st century thinking and making life. Love, death, friendship, grievous violence, systemic racism, Greek Myth, American History and life in the Bronx she hails from are just a very little of what Reid takes up in this stunning first book. Those of us who have been following her work for a while have known Reid would come flying out of the gates and, well, here is the emphatic proof.”
—Laird Hunt, National Book Award finalist for Zorrie
“Chanté Reid’s Thot unzipped me in a novel way, zipping me into and out of Morrison’s Beloved, which it springs from and darts around. I love its inventive form, a mobius strip of hybrid essay-poem polyvocality that instead of editing out interruptions and second thoughts and contexts and contradictions instead archives and holds them close. Part annotation, part close reading, all song, Thot is a wild ride, and I’m all in for it.”
—Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer and The Gnome
"Stunning. I simply could not admire a debut more than I admire Chanté L. Reid's."
—Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment