“Ashon T. Crawley pushes his readers to contemplate the intimacy of living the life of the mind as a spiritual, enfleshed, and intellectual matter. Rejecting the intellect/emotion division through a rendering of intimacy and desire, The Lonely Letters stands as the achievement of aspirations long discussed but largely elusive in both feminist and queer criticism. A stunning and innovative work.” — Imani Perry, author of Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation
“The Lonely Letters is a joyful mourning, a celebratory treatise, a rigorous performance, and an analysis of race and philosophy, aesthetics and blackness, and much more. I could not put it down and at points found myself laughing and in tears, all the while learning. Truly pathbreaking, it is an astounding, innovative, and deeply affecting work.” — Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination
"Crawley’s incantatory repetitions and vertiginous shifts of topic and tone perform the entangled Blackpentecostal aesthetics he strives to describe, making it quite unlike other academic texts. In his rendering, Blackpentecostal expressive practices – specific approaches to musical performance, poetry, painting, dance, everyday speech, etc.—enable those who become entangled to experience the world in a new way. And in The Lonely Letters, Ashon Crawley achieves the remarkable by putting this insight into practice, by enacting as well as describing Blackpentecostalism." — Jesse Chevan, Current Musicology