A review by tallonrk1
Bessie Smith by Nick Drake, Jackie Kay

4.0

This is wonderful. An imaginative, poetic biography of blues-singing phenomenon Bessie Smith, but it's more than that. Kay's imagination and intimate writing here is vivid and engaging. And, it really rewrites what we consider "biography" and how we approach searching for queerness and recovering queerness from the archives. Genre-bending, time-bending, truth-bending, this is one hell of a (non)/fictional (auto)/biography. 8/10