Residual
Published on 11. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-64362-296-5 (ISBN)
Description
Writing alongside the specter of premature death, Tisa Bryant traces the contours of Black women's interior lives and domestic spaces through meditations on literature, cinema, installations, and archival research to reaffirm her own way of being.
In the long aftermath of her mother's death, Tisa Bryant's Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother's everyday life asking, what else is an archive-a bookshelf, a dresser drawer, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories and impressions as well as archives of renowned Black women, who also died prematurely, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Bryant's hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, intention, impressions, and failure in the wake of loss.
In the long aftermath of her mother's death, Tisa Bryant's Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother's everyday life asking, what else is an archive-a bookshelf, a dresser drawer, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories and impressions as well as archives of renowned Black women, who also died prematurely, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Bryant's hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, intention, impressions, and failure in the wake of loss.
Reviews / Votes
"Fifteen years after her mother's death, Bryant attempts to confront the emptiness and loneliness she felt in the wake of the loss... through captivating writing that hovers between prose and poetry, Bryant paints a moving portrait of grief."--Publishers Weekly
"A meditative, soulful, and deeply moving tribute. In Residual, I recognized diaspora's shatter-the silence, the laughter, and the secret knowing that passes between mothers and daughters. This book is an inventory and an altar."
-Lara Mimosa Montes
"Enigmatic, powerful essays address Bryant's work to come to terms with her mother's life and death."
-Kristen Rabe, Foreword Reviews
"Tisa Bryant is, quite simply, an icon. Her work lives not on my bookshelf but on an altar of formative texts as cherished, to me, as Toomer, Rilke, and Carson. In Residual, she grieves her mother as though solving a mystery, creating a portal that is also a museum, an account of her own becoming, aliving, breathing stage set. The pages are haunted by authors and artists across space and time, a presence that is not, as she writes, "an academic affair," but a kind of lighting, longing, and music that enlivens the walls and corners of Bryant's interior world."
-Aisha Sabatini Sloan
"Tisa Bryant unmakes and remakes diasporic attachments, offering a poetic genealogy that is animated by flowers, perfumes, chrome furnishings, wide plank floors, plush sounds and song. Within, moments of incredible loss are knitted to faded familiarities, disintegrated papers, Cicely Tyson, laughter, trouble. Residual is a wonderful spatial experiment."
-Katherine McKittrick
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 152 mm
Width: 229 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
366 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-64362-296-5 (9781643622965)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on Black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborates with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book series of visual mixtape love letters to black people and black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has written for shows and catalogs for artists Jacob Mason-Macklin, Cauleen Smith, Laylah Ali, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, among others, and has work forthcoming in Brink. She is an assistant professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.