The two-time National Book Award winner has gathered her previously published essays into a single volume, tragically leaving behind the glossy, eighty-page fashion spreads that once gave the prose its crucial thematic tension.
In the newly released “On Witness and Respair,” two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward has undertaken the seemingly noble but ultimately catastrophic task of gathering her disparate essays, profiles, and appreciations into a single, uninterrupted volume; in doing so, she has violently excised the very commercial scaffolding—the gleaming, full-page spreads for luxury midsize sedans and peptide-rich anti-aging serums—that lent her original periodical publications their necessary dialectical friction.
It is, perhaps, entirely too much to expect the casual bookstore patron to grasp that to consume Ward’s profound meditations on systemic inequity without the immediate, jarring juxtaposition of an eight-page Chanel fragrance insert is to fundamentally misunderstand the rhythm of the modern prose form; one cannot truly comprehend the moral architecture of Milton’s *Paradise Lost* without its original 1667 printer’s errors, nor the spatial dynamics of the 1892 Parisian literary journal *La Plume*, nor, indeed, the exhaustive boss-battle strategy guide for *Donkey Kong Country 2* found in the centerfold of a 1996 *Nintendo Power*. Ward’s decision to bind her work in a sterile, ad-free hardcover is a craven capitulation to the middlebrow desire for continuity, asking the reader to move from a harrowing essay on Southern lineage directly into a profile of a literary peer while utterly denying them the vital, sobering palate cleanser of a mail-order catalog for customized orthopedic footwear.
By stripping away the adjacent ephemera of a September issue, Ward has inexplicably sterilized her own staggering genius; a meditation on mortality simply does not land with the same crushing, existential weight unless the reader’s thumb is simultaneously resting on a glossy, scratch-and-sniff sample of Dior Sauvage.
It is a distinctly contemporary failure of nerve to assume the text alone can sustain the immense weight of its own inquiries; we have largely forgotten that the true subject of any published essay is not the stated subject at all, but rather the stark, haunting contrast between an author’s desperate grappling with human frailty and the facing page’s cheerful insistence that a $12,000 wristwatch might somehow halt the march of time. One can only hope that future printings of “On Witness and Respair” will correct this glaring editorial cowardice, perhaps by arbitrarily inserting three to four heavy-stock subscription blow-in cards that flutter to the floor precisely as the reader confronts the deepest depths of American sorrow.