Unfinished Grief

Takes up the work of artists and theorists who ask what happens when we learn to linger, dwell, live, and work with queer grief

What if, instead of overcoming grief, we learned to live with it? Unfinished Grief invites readers to linger within loss and to understand mourning not as an endpoint, but as a mode of relation, continuance, and care.

In this lyrical follow-up to his acclaimed After the Party, Joshua Chambers-Letson turns toward the art and theory of grief as a way of imagining queer survival. Drawing from queer of color critique, performance studies, Asian American studies, and Black studies, Chambers-Letson explores how love and loss are inseparable conditions of queer life. Engaging artists including Yoko Ono, Gertrude Stein, Bimbola Akinbola, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joshua Rains, and Kia LaBeija, he considers the lessons art and performance teach about living with what remains unfinished.

Set against the backdrop of public and private catastrophe, from war and pandemics to the ravages of racial capitalism, Unfinished Grief insists that mourning and political struggle are entwined practices. Through sensuous, reflective prose and a deeply personal critical voice, Chambers-Letson reveals how grief can be both a sustaining and shattering site of vulnerability, creativity, and communal becoming. Intimate, meditative, and defiantly alive, Unfinished Grief reflects on the queer art of mourning in this guide to the beautiful, difficult work of staying with loss and finding life within it.