Milk White Steed
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The mournful, tragicomic tune of wanderlust undercut by the longing for a home seemingly lost
“Have I settled down yet?” The question rings eternal across all ten stories in this highly anticipated debut collection of comics fiction by New Yorker and New York Times contributor Michael D. Kennedy.
A series of individuals leave the West Indies and attempt to find their footing in the damp dinge of England’s counties. A child on his daily trike ride is stalked by a sinister, shape-shifting ligahoo. A blues singer’s wife hallucinates untoward revelations in the grips of high yellow fever when she inhales spores from psychedelic mushrooms growing unchecked in their apartment. A man dwells on his absent father, paints the man into a duppy myth, and bears the consequences of this fantastical undertaking.
Inspired by the folk tales and oral traditions of his Caribbean roots, Milk White Steed is a dreamlike venture into the messy truths of everyday West Indian lives: the abiding pursuit of the familiar and the vicious appraisal of their own otherness, all at once. Phantom desires, unchecked reveries, and surreal visions of the future flood the page in full-color. Kennedy’s decisive woodcut-inspired brush-strokes draw a striking portrait of the Black diaspora as it sees itself, always searching and yet forever seeing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dislocation and unfulfilled dreams haunt this ragged yet affecting debut collection from New Yorker cartoonist Kennedy. With a blocky style that alternates between immersive chaos and wider scenes of emptiness, Kennedy's storytelling is loose, fanciful, and at times hard to grasp. The 10 stories span decades, oceans, and even solar systems but are linked by the longing for home. Kennedy's semi-dazed wanderers and dreamers traverse the cold damp "bleak" of England's Midlands, where Caribbean emigrants of the Windrush generation face nativist hate and loneliness; 1920s Louisiana, where a ghostly folk tale has the cutting rawness of an undiscovered Delta blues masterpiece; and a faraway planet where even interstellar exploration cannot escape the stain of colonialism. There are fitful references to resistance, as in the callout to dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's "Inglan is a Bitch" and a woman's declaration of postcolonial optimism ("Damn right, the Irish, the Africas, next the Indies... all the rapers and the pillagers can get stuffed!"). But despite all the talking animals, spirits, and shape-shifting, Kennedy's vision maintains a gritty, true-to-life understanding of the perpetually in-between state of diasporic peoples. This dreamy and embittered work lays bare the challenges of living in an inequitable world.
