The Lamentations

Patrick Anderson’s The Lamentations: A Requiem for Queer Suicide is incredibly moving, beautifully written, and important in its documenting of the persistent narrative trope of queer suicide. It offers a timely history of the present in a moment of increasing violence against LGBTQ+ people. I was frequently moved to tears by the many stories Anderson gathers here and the tender analysis of the mundane aspects of loss. I know others will be moved as well.---Lisa Diedrich, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and the author of the books Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism, Indirect Action, and Treatments

Through poetic and poignant prose Patrick Anderson fingers the trace of loved ones whose ghosts haunt the pages recounting their passing. This book is a reckoning, a coming to terms with what it means to queer suicide and in that queer(y)ing examine the depth of loss left in its wake. The Lamentations is, indeed, an archive of queer mourning.---E. Patrick Johnson, author of Honeypot: Black Queer Women Who Love Women

What do we owe our queer dead? Patrick Anderson’s The Lamentations gifts us with a map to understand how queer loss through suicide is not just an act of individual volition. With every story of queer loss that we lament we must consider how another ending would have been possible were it not for the social, political, and institutional structures that have demanded that queer suicide be understood as an “honorable thing.” Helping us break free from “the archetype of queer suicide,” as Anderson elegantly calls this dishonorable killer logic, The Lamentations provides the framework from and through which we might envision queer repair and redress with ethical precision. In this stunning and elegantly written book, Anderson serves as our Doula, confronting what it means to care for the memory of our queer dead and how their stories survive beyond their disembodiment in the everyday of our embodied lives. Structured as a secular requiem—a composition to honor the dead—The Lamentations is a meditation about how to do justice for the queer dead who came before through ethical, emotional, and embodied repair.---Lázaro Lima, author of Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question, The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American and Literary and Cultural Memory, and co-editor with Felice Picano of Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing.

At once elegy and love letter to his dearly departed, The Lamentations bears witness to the suffering of those who have passed by their own hand and the paradox of queer becoming through the emptiness of loss. Anderson is a philosopher-poet illuminating the intertwined nature of queer death and emergence.---David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania