Voice of the Fish

Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory memoir that explores the trans experience through meditations upon aquatic life and mythology. It is set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak, read, and write. In their adept hands, these poignant, allusive shards take shape as a unified whole: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between—and subtle reflections upon—longer memories of their life, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

Horn swims through a range of subjects; across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From their childhood modelling for their mother's art installations—immersed in a bath with dead squid; encased in a full-body plaster cast—to their travels before they were out as trans, these beguiling fragments are linked by a desire to interrogate the physical and to identify the current beneath. Horn re-examines presumptions about the unchanging nature of the body, privileging instead ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. Sensuous and immersive, Voice of the Fish is unique: a masterful and moving achievement.