Matthew Morris’ The Tilling is hybridity at its finest. Morris writes on the cusp of poetry and essayistic prose, instilling us with fragments of a whole story. What compels me about Morris’ prose is the defamiliarized lyricism embedded within it. He leaves us off in the introductory essay with these words: “This half-(ghost-)body isn’t a cliché because this half-(ghost-) body is only the body of a tragic mulatto half the time–other half I’m just a blood-pumping human-body, you know, heart-beating on this spinning blue-green ball shuttling through blackest space,” (5). He goes against the grain of what it means to exist in a body, how a body is not tragic, especially his which has become so politicized. He writes at the intersection of identity, navigating being the light-skinned son of a black father and a white mother. Morris not only creates fragments with the essays themselves but does this within his sentence structures.

Morris is asking “Don’t break it/into sections. See through it/it through,” (3). Almost ironic, given that this is an essay collection broken into sections. A book so fragmented the paragraphs in the essay Fucked Fable act like they’re floating away from each other. In the essay The No Longer he writes, “Knew that she would accept me. That she would,” (67). And “Ours was a family emancipated, yet later swept back in: ebb tide, then the swell. Another family upended,” (71). The fragmented sentence structure creates a dissonance and at the same time a reinforcement, not unlike the watching of a tide.

Morris plays with and against this idea of voice in literature. He asks us in his introductory essay Tragic Mulatto, “What is, I mean, that voice? What do folks (friends, acquaintances, strangers, love interests) read when they read nah or ain’t or stuff you know I know ain’t the King’s English? What is, I mean, interesting about me using that voice? Why do you want to see me use that voice, slide into the voice? Do you, and you?” (2). This use of direct address and questioning adds this level that Morris is introducing the reader to the tone he will be both utilizing and challenging in these essays. The essay starts with “Hey, listen, please, American you,” (1). A perfect first sentence, situating us in place and a plea from Matthew Morris. We, as readers, are brought into this essay with an ear to the page, hanging onto everything Morris asks of us.

The Tilling, at times, feels like a road trip through America. Morris drives us from Virginia to South Carolina to the cosmics and the sonics and through the four chambers of the heart. Morris asks us “Do you, American you, know your heart’s construction?” (142). Morris returns to this idea of the “American you”, this idea of questioning. A reaching out. As Morris says, “Every time I write, or try to, in this direction–pointing south–I feel like I am reaching. Like I’m sifting: cakey dirt in my hands, and then not,” (157). He leaves us with the cicadas, as the cicadas leave him– a distinct marker of time.