Poetry. GHOST BOX is based on the story of Emily. In the fall of 2012, Emily arrived in the parking lot of a vacant big-box store, or "ghost box," near downtown Los Angeles with 45-pound bags of cat food. She converted the otherwise vacant property into an impromptu bird sanctuary, and evaded arrest by the LAPD for months. Emerson Whitney adventures into the weirdness of Emily's story and the strangeness of vacant urban space, writing wildness and ferocity into the strip mall. GHOST BOX is gross and wry, gorgeous and feral, a hoarse cry from abandoned city space: "we want to be beautiful too." "Emerson Whitney's Ghost Box is a poetic detective story whose scene of the crime is nothing less than contemporary capitalism and its threat to--or decimation of--wilderness, wildness. That said, this is an intimate tale, populated by our (intrepid, lucid, sly) narrator, "the man with the rake," wheeling birds, and most importantly, "Emily," placeholder for / ghost of disobedience, conscience, craziness, and beauty. From the detritus of a vacant lot, Whitney wrestles a poetic document that bears witness, winks, invents, and soars." - Maggie Nelson, Author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty "Poetry where everyone gets the Love is rare. Something like being stroked by the still-warm hands of a freshly collapsed empire, or maybe it's warmth from the fire building around it, but Emerson Whitney has slapped us into the frame with the other way to belong here. 'And I wanted to shout, but I whispered what looks like almost nothing is wild.' I love these poems so much, making me be nowhere but Whitney's brand new way of being present. I'm grateful to be alive with them!" - CAConrad, Author of ECODEVIANCE

Ghost Box (Tract, 3)

Literature & Fiction

Whitney, Emerson

Poetry

Timeless, Infinite Light

Heaven

In the first few pages of Heaven, Emerson Whitney writes: “Really, I can’t explain myself without making a mess.” What follows is that mess―electrifying, gorgeous. In arresting prose, Whitney writes of moving through homes around the country, of transness, and, at the book’s root, of their complex and often difficult relationship with their mother: their first window into understanding womanness and all that’s bound up in it. Whitney streaks this through with queer and gender theory, standing audaciously in the face of uncertainty, to ask: “if the ‘feminine’ thus far has only existed as a defective version of a masculine idea, then maybe there’s something living, like between the gap in the sidewalk, that is actual femininity, accessible to all.” Whitney stands in the gap, writes in the gap. Heaven functions much like a hand-dipped candle, lowered patiently into theory and memory―a caught manta rays hanging aloft a dock, a mother checking her teeth in the mirror above the stove―that, taken together, thicken into an astounding, expansive examination of what makes us up. For fans of Eileen Myles or Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Whitney’s Heaven introduces an important new public intellectual.

Biographies & Memoirs

McSweeney's

Daddy Boy

In 2017, Emerson Whitney was divorcing the woman they'd been with for ten years--a dominatrix they called Daddy. Living in a tent in the backyard of their marital home, Emerson was startled to realize they didn't know what it meant to be an adult. "We often look to our gender roles as a sort of map for aging," they write. "I wanted to know what the process looked like without that: not man-ness, not-woman-ness." Dizzied by this realization, they turned to an activity steeped in stereotypical masculinity: storm chasing. Daddy Boy follows Emerson as they pack into a van with a rag-tag group of storm chasers and drive up and down tornado ally--from Texas to North Dakota--staying in motels and eating at gas stations and hunting down storms like so many white whales. In heading with them to Texas, we return, too, to the only site of adulthood Emerson has ever known: their childhood. Interspersed throughout this trip are memories of dad--both Emerson's stepdad, Hank, present and unflinching and extremely Texan; and their biological dad, who they hardly knew. With his cowboy hats and random girlfriends, he always seemed so sweet and lost. Through these childhood vignettes, coupled with queer theory and weeks spent reading the clouds like oracles, wanting nothing more than to drive straight into the eye of a storm, Emerson frames these probing questions of manhood against the dusty, loaded background of the American West.

Review\nA finalist for the Believer Book Award\nNamed a best book by Kirkus, Bomb, the AV Club, PAPER, Literary Hub, Refinery29, Ms. Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, the Observer, and the Seattle Times.\n“Whitney stands as a deft executor of their own unique style… a writer who guides with an intuitive vulnerability and honesty.” 
―The Paris Review\n“An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body.” 
―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\n“Melodic and engagingly written, Heaven will enrapture anyone who loves reading for beauty and intellectual challenge at once.” 
―Literary Hub\n“Emerson Whitney’s first prose book is a frank and absorbing examination of transness, brokenness, mothering, femininity, embodiment and truth.” 
―Ms. Magazine\nOne of the Observer's Best Books of Spring\n“Heaven is an unflinching personal examination of family and identity, bearing witness to what it means to live life on one’s own terms.” 
―Foreword Reviews\n“A gripping memoir whose sentences are akin to a skipped heartbeat” 
―PAPER, best books to buy in Quarantine 
"(U)tterly hypnotic... a gorgeous book that feels like a painting" 
―The Seattle Times, Women's History Month Reading List 
“(W)hat Heaven does best is capture the disorienting pull of unsettling childhood memories―at once incomplete and terribly weighted.” 
―AV Club\n“Provocative, emotional, infinitely faceted... a reminder that messiness is at the heart of all beautiful things” 
―Refinery29\nA finalist for the Believer Book Award\nEmerson Whitney writes, "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess-electrifying, gorgeous, defiant. 
At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose-all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton-to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.\nAn expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book. 
"A forceful act of writing." 
-Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls 
"A poetic, candid, probing reckoning with childhood, the maternal, gender, and the possibilities of theory which will both speak to its time and outlast it." 
-Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 
"An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body." 
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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Books by Whitney, Emerson

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Whitney, Emerson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ghost Box (Tract, 3)

Heaven

Daddy Boy

Heaven