Saturday Review: “Lightening Strikes Twice” a review by Al-Tariq Moore in NCLR Online Winter 2024
Randall Kenan. Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings (2022)
This new collection of various essays published elsewhere allows the reader of Kenan’s lauded fiction a deeper understanding of the writer crafting the stories. Moore elucidates, “Kenan wants readers to reconsider the South, to look deeper than the violence of racism that plagues its geographic and historic reputation, to see that what we understand and discuss most often as Southern simultaneously invokes a discussion of Blackness. When we discuss the South we are discussing Blackness, and when we discuss Blackness we are in many ways discussing the South.”
Invoking Butler, Baldwin, and Morrison, Moore places this collection firmly on league with exemplary authors. Following on the heels of Kenan’s last nonfiction collection — The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food — Moore astutely writes, “Kenan wants to put meat on the bones, to thicken the substance of discussions about how we digest culture and difference. What better way to do that than through an examination of our relationships to food.”
Read the entire review in the Online Winter 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org or your favorite independent bookseller.
