The Lonely Letters

“Ashon T. Crawley pushes his readers to contemplate the intimacy of living the life of the mind as a spiritual, enfleshed, and intellectual matter. Rejecting the intellect/emotion division through a rendering of intimacy and desire, The Lonely Letters stands as the achievement of aspirations long discussed but largely elusive in both feminist and queer criticism. A stunning and innovative work.” -- Imani Perry, author of * Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation *
“The Lonely Letters is a joyful mourning, a celebratory treatise, a rigorous performance, and an analysis of race and philosophy, aesthetics and blackness, and much more. I could not put it down and at points found myself laughing and in tears, all the while learning. Truly pathbreaking, it is an astounding, innovative, and deeply affecting work.” -- Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of * On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination *
"The Lonely Letters, from A to Moth, from Crawley to us, is ultimately an illumination of a way to Baby Suggs’ clearing in Beloved, the site of blackqueer care, the site of grace—an invitation to 'refuse the prison of "I" and choose the open spaces of "we.”'" -- Yumi Pak * American Studies *
"I admire Crawley’s writing about queerness and sociality profoundly. I revere his embrace of the epistolary, of the way he makes academic writing feel pulsing and alive, enacted with breath and desire and shouting and song. . . . [E]ach letter is a flexing, embodied interweaving of queer theory, Black studies, music, eros, intellect, art, friendship, religion, body, breath. It is critical and creative all at once." -- Ayden Leroux * Full Stop *
"Crawley opens the world of critical theory (a discipline not known best for being welcoming to all minds and approaches) to those readers who might not have a background in it."
  -- Leora Fridman * Full Stop *
“The Lonely Letters, in thinking through and with Black life, challenges the reader to (re)imagine religion, mysticism, epistemology, performance, and the possibility of life together otherwise.... [It] bears the potential to push religious studies scholarship beyond what was presumed possible.” -- Christopher Hunt * Journal of Africana Religions *
“The Lonely Letters arrives as a wonderful surprise: it invites us to sit with vulnerability, and to ask what vulnerability might offer our world-imagining practices.” -- Keguro Macharia * GLQ *
“You can’t review [The Lonely Letters]. Because you haven’t just read a book. You’ve had an encounter. A beautiful, blackqueer, encounter.” -- Biko Gray * Reading Religion *