“How do you pick
your mom up from jail? How do you mourn the death of your
grandmother, who was both a powerfully seductive and vital force in
your life, but at the same time, awful and tragic? How do you wait
three months for your premature twin babies to get out of the NICU
without going mad from fear and guilt? With a strong voice that is at
times sparse and direct, at other times poetic and knowing, Tyrese
Coleman confronts these and other questions in this beautiful debut
collection, How to Sit. In these stories and essays, she uncovers a
paradoxical truth: that sometimes it’s the more difficult things
that you can face with surprising bravery and it’s the things that
are supposed to come “easy” that are the hardest to learn. How to
Sit is, at root, a reflection on how to live. How to both accept and
transcend your past. Coleman excavates her personal history,
sometimes in stories handed down from past generations, sometimes in
DNA results, and she discovers that it’s the act of writing itself
that can free her from her family, her guilt, maybe even herself. For
Coleman, there is ‘no way to escape except to live her own
fiction.’”
—David Olimpio,
Author of This Is Not a Confession
