"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 " 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 "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 "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. The reader learns what it might mean to live between sound and its lack, what it is to discover and remake one's own culture, between Britain and Jamaica, Deafness and birdsong.

You will find here what it is to watch and be watched by our world, what it is to be a good human in a tough time, to be filled with wonder, even in the age of a crumbling empire, what it is to be a young father, an aging son, a human being with talent for language that is memorable and clarifying. 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.