Ronaldo V. Wilson: Virgil Kills

Nightboat Books, 2021, Softcover, 352 pages, 19.5 × 13 cm

Linked 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.