The Quiet Ear - by Raymond Antrobus (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking exploration of deafness by a young award-winning poet--a memoir, a cultural history, and a call to action

"Expansive, generous, and massively tender."--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

"Beautifully complicates and expands our understanding of what deafness is . . . a book that changed how I will move through the world."--Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

I live with the aid of deafness. Like poetry, it has given me an art, a history, a culture and a tradition to live through. This book charts that art in the hopes of offering a map, a mirror, a small part of a larger story.

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds--bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn't believe he was deaf at all.

The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus's upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Antrobus explores the shame of miscommunication, the joy of finding community, and shines a light on deaf education.

Throughout, Antrobus sets his story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figures--from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers--the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up. A singular, remarkable work, The Quiet Ear is a much-needed examination of deafness in the world.

Review Quotes

"Raymond Antrobus is a brilliant and wise writer who makes the world seem more full of possibilities for connection and belonging. A journey through language, history and family, The Quiet Ear is a moving and expansive book about the long journey of finding a voice, and the joy and power of using it."--Séan Hewitt, author of Open, Heaven

"In The Quiet Ear, Raymond Antrobus lifts up a defiant mirror to the mainstream world that has long ignored and shamed the d/Deaf communities and masterfully crafts a world we all deserve: one free of shame, one where deaf people are uplifted, empowered, no longer at the margins of society, but in the center, full of joy and thriving. The Quiet Ear is a must-read for all. Everyone needs this book."--Javier Zamora, author of Solito

"The Quiet Ear is expansive, generous, and massively tender--a beautiful exploration of an interior life grappling with several magnitudes of loss, and what can be found within them."--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

"Beautifully complicates and expands our understanding of what deafness is. . . The Quiet Ear has given me new ways to think about the vibration of sound, the movement of language, and the complicated contours of shame. It is a book that changed how I will move through the world."--Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

"Raymond Antrobus is one of my favorite poets. The Quiet Ear is a marvel, a story of his life as a Deaf man in a society as unjust as ours, which he investigates with clarity, honesty, endless patience, and tenderness for what our world could be. Antrobus is a terrific writer, yes, but what is more, he is an honest one. The Quiet Ear will fill your day with all kinds of music."--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

"A powerful and important book . . . This expansive memoir chronicles Antrobus's vexed journey across and between the multitudes he contains: his Jamaican heritage and his British one; his blackness and his whiteness; and, again and again, the fraught but ultimately joyful experience of living between hearing and deafness. His voice is at once blunt and lyrical, angry and curious."--Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Country of the Blind

"The Quiet Ear presents a complex portrait of deafness that goes beyond living without sound. Antrobus situates his own personal story of growing up not quite Black or deaf enough within larger contexts of D/deaf culture, race, masculinity, and colonialism. Lyrical, moving and powerful."--Alice Wong, editor of Disability Intimacy and author of Year of the Tiger

About the Author

Raymond Antrobus is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Signs/Music, of which the title poem was published in The New Yorker. His work has won numerous prizes in the UK, where his poems are frequently taught in schools. He is also the author of two children's books, including Can Bears Ski?, which became the first story broadcast on the BBC entirely in British Sign Language. Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and appointed an MBE. He lives in London.