Feral City

Starred review from July 1, 2022

Moss's (Vanishing New York) book is, in some ways, the autobiographical equivalent of the apocalyptic novels by N. K. Jemison and Emily St. John Mandel. But with a strange, beautiful sense of hope and healing, made when a wrecked world requires all the resiliency people with nondominant gender and sexual identities quietly cultivated by necessity during the "before times." Chapters evocative of now-too-familiar sentiments ("Emptiness Gives Permission," "The Phase of Breaking," and "I Would Prefer Not To") lend the book on an almost universal feel made personal when Moss layers in descriptions of living in a New York experienced through peepholes and peripheries, a place where as a trans poet, he sought out anonymity, enclosure, and safety. That is, until lockdown turned the world of influencers upside down, and vacant spaces suddenly offered new protection. This is a brilliant story of being lost and finding a place when socially constructed ideas of how people can or should show up are dismantled. It also examines what happens when dominant culture attempts to reassert its so-called order. VERDICT Highly recommended, not just for queer readers or scholars of LGBTQIA+ culture but for anyone who has felt inexorably gutted and remade during the COVID pandemic.--Emily Bowles

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 11, 2022
Pushcart Prize winner Moss (Vanishing New York) reflects in these razor-sharp essays on how life in New York City changed when the “New People” (“young and funded... utterly unblemished, physically fit and clean-cut, as bland as skim milk and unsalted Saltines”) fled during the Covid-19 pandemic. Moss, who moved to the East Village in the 1990s as a “young, queer, transsexual poet,” opens with a lacerating account of how his building has changed in recent decades, describing neighbors who presume their “total security and comfort” and fill restaurants with overbearing noise “charged with social status.” Though he savored the “velvet drape of silence” that descended when these New People abandoned the city in March 2020, he also had to reckon with fear and isolation. “Buddy, if this goes on much longer,” a pizza vendor tells him, “you should buy a gun. We’re all gonna need guns.” Nevertheless, “the weird magic of pandemic time” allowed Moss to rediscover the “subterranean feeling” he used to experience in New York and to meet the “radicals, skateboarders, artists, and eccentrics” who stayed behind. Shot through with pinpoint character sketches, incisive reportage on the Occupy City Hall protest movement, and lucid discussions of queer theory, this is a vital contribution to New York City history.

Starred review from September 1, 2022
A dynamic memoir of life during lockdown in New York City. Through a series of essays, writer and psychotherapist Moss shares his experiences as a transgender man during the quarantine period. In the 1990s, writes the author, he ran to the city "to be free and find my people." However, over the past 25 years, the city has changed drastically, a process the author examined insightfully and ruefully in Vanishing New York. During this time, he writes, the "New People" took over, and they "are the same everywhere, colonizing cities with a mass-produced, globalized state of mind." From inside his small apartment in the East Village, he watched as New People moved in, looking "like a J. Crew catalog, ultra-white and monied, everything new and polished, not a speck of human messiness." However, on March 16, 2020, Moss awoke to a ghost town, and the city began to feel like its old, chaotic self. The piles of Amazon packages subsided, music played in the streets again, and parks began rewilding. For years, Moss recalls, he felt invisible, so he tried to blend in and look normal. When the pandemic set in, however, "the streets were reclaimed by the Blacks, the queers, the socialists, the freaks," and the author was moved to participate in Black Lives Matter and other protests. Eventually, though, people began feeling powerless, and riots and looting began increasing in frequency. With raw emotion and spot-on sociological portraits, Moss ponders the reasons why "I feel such relief in the turbulence of the disorderly city." As the pandemic has dragged on, more and more people express the desire to want things to get "back to normal," whatever that means. "Normal is the last thing I want to go back to," writes the author. With the city returning to so-called "normal," writes Moss, "the streets become remarkably whiter," and "an obliterating sameness" resumes. A captivating chronicle driven by keen wit, a strong sense of place, and a clear love of a city's old soul.

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