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

"Crawley’s incantatory repetitions and vertiginous shifts of topic and tone perform the entangled Blackpentecostal aesthetics he strives to describe, making it quite unlike other academic texts. In his rendering, Blackpentecostal expressive practices – specific approaches to musical performance, poetry, painting, dance, everyday speech, etc.—enable those who become entangled to experience the world in a new way. And in The Lonely Letters, Ashon Crawley achieves the remarkable by putting this insight into practice, by enacting as well as describing Blackpentecostalism." - Jesse Chevan, Current Musicology

"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