“As a child, I believed my body thrummed with fishes. I drew pictures: the body aqueous—ovular, amorphous—walled by cartilage, algae, silt. Eels coiled in the stomach. Anemones pulsed in the gut. And always a pike—lone, muscular—writhed up the throat.”
Lars Horn Voice of the Fish
Graywolf Press, USA
Footnote Press, UK
Voice of the Fish
A Lyric Essay
Winner of the 2020 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Nonfiction, an honor book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award, and an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection.
“This book left me stunned. Breathtaking in its scope and generosity, Voice of the Fish is that rare work that defies easy categorization. … We are in the midst of a rare and transcendent talent, and how lucky we are that Lars Horn exists.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
Modelling in baths of dead squid. The history of aquariums. Sturgeon swimming through sleep. In Voice of the Fish, themes of water and aquatic life provide entry points into discussions of sexuality, transmasculinity, illness, faith, and the plastic arts. The essays interrogate liminal physicalities, re-examining the presumed uniformity of bodily experience or, indeed, the implied singularity of “the body” as cultural and scientific object. Instead, the essays privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. If the body could be animal, mineral, a thing of breadth, strange new landscape.
“Horn wants ‘language and narrative to carry more physicality.’ Voice of the Fish meets this desire with a narrative that swells and recedes, with intimate depictions of the writer’s life as well as more distant tales of Pliny the Elder, a 100-year-old manuscript found in the belly of a codfish, and the history of tattooing.”
— Corinne Manning, New York Times Book Review
“Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish was one of those books that left me changed. . . . The writing, sentence for sentence, is extraordinary.”
— Alexander Chee, The Millions
“Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay is compelling and uniformly beautiful on every page; it charts a poet’s attention to detail. A slippery, enigmatic thing … impressively inquisitive, lyric and rhapsodic. …Voice of the Fish offers a strangely subtle erudition. From the faulty eyesight of Greenland sharks to the Graeco-Roman distinction between branding and tattooing, the range of information here never calls attention to itself, never makes a show of knowing. It all fits. … A mesmerizing debut.”
— Nels Christensen, Amy Butcher, Rhoda Janzen, GLCA New Writers Award for Nonfiction
“Ocean-deep and brimming with beauty, Voice of the Fish is a wondrous book, formed with the expansiveness and strong currents of a vast body of water. I didn't want to leave until I'd seen every glowing image.”
— Elissa Washuta
“Voice of the Fish is a mighty and innovative work unshackled from the patriarchal and heteronormative syntax and prose of the accepted literary cannon. . . . Adventurous, bold, antiauthoritarian, and physical, we would all be well served to take note of this generation of new writers to which Horn belongs, sending us missives from the future of language and storytelling.”
— Casey Legler
“Casting a wide net into the realms of knowing and existing, trawling the depths of the past and the body, Lars Horn steers us in pristine and ponderous prose to places where the body is washed up, transformed, reborn. Voice of the Fish is a dazzling assemblage of essaying at its finest.”
— Jenny Boully