Nothing at All

An atmospheric rumination on gendered violence, cosmic collapse, and colonialism, from acclaimed author Olivia Tapiero, finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Lambda Literary Awards, and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Available for the first time in English, with an all-new foreword by Anne Boyer.

“I’m trying to find out whose ghost I am.”

From deep inside a black hole comes Nothing At All—a space where form, genre, gender, and being collapse. In poetic, essayistic fragments overflowing with apocalyptic beauty, Olivia Tapiero explores how history, illness, and desire intertwine amid personal and collective suffering: the betrayal of a tainted blood transfusion and its ramifications throughout the family tree; the brutality of colonialism and the cold comfort of diaspora in its aftermath; the wormholes opened by acts of violence across space and time.

But even as decay and perversion manifest at every stop from the bottom of the ocean to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, Tapiero resists letting this become a mere document of misery. Implicit in her vivid, visceral imagery of disintegration is the opportunity for renewal and rebirth—a balm for our wounded era, the hope amid ruin that something can come from nothing.