Coming from Yale University Press, July 2026​    Preorder

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From an award-winning writer, a personal and critical meditation on vision and re-visioning.

 

When Carousel: An Essay on Seeing opens, a professor begins delivering a slide lecture to a darkened classroom: 

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"It's the audience that allows a performance to begin. Every limit is a set of controls. Who is speaking? Not 'I' anymore, an angle without audience, but a marionette, a woman elsewhere, everywhere else, everywhere strung into a frame."

 

Across short, immersive sections blending art history with memoir, close looking with confession, Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic visions frames power, distorts reality, and implicates contemporary viewers and subjects. Masterfully fusing the slide carousel and the lyric essay Minor invites us to see across time as a professor-narrator Minor tying the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist painting and Instagram reels to drone warfare. In language that captures the disorientation of the whirling ride, Minor shows us how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.