Lars Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, on Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Horn is the author of Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, (Graywolf Press), an essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In their hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book weaving short vignettes about fish, shrines, and antiquities serving as interludes between longer essays. Horn swims through various subjects, roving across maritime history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. These essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of “the body” as a cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.
