Residual

by Tisa Bryant

In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Tisa Bryant’s Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother’s everyday life, asking what becomes an archive—a bookshelf, a dresser, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories as well as archives of renowned Black women who died prematurely—including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler—Bryant’s hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, and failure in the wake of loss.

272 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

Tisa Bryant’s work often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history, creating multi-layered texts that demand new forms.

Her first book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from Eurocentric film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. In her introduction to Bryant’s recent reading, Stacy Szymaszek, director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York, said, “Like the great Edouard Glissant, her work is at once novel, essay and poetry, these modulations emerging and transmuting in a practice Bryant's latest publication, a collaborative volume with author/filmmaker Chris Kraus for the Belladonna Elders Series, contains an excerpt from her next novel, [the curator], a rumination on cinema and a black woman's ways of seeing.

Bryant maintains an active engagement with visual arts and literary community as a founding editor/publisher of the cross-genre hardcover annual, The Encyclopedia Project, and as faculty in the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Reviews

[DALYN MILLER]

Residual is a deeply introspective and formally inventive work that explores grief, memory, and the act of preservation through a hybrid memoir structure. In the wake of personal loss, Tisa Bryant constructs a narrative that moves between the intimate and the archival, examining what remains when both physical and emotional anchors are disrupted.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is its engagement with the concept of the archive. Rather than limiting this idea to formal collections, Bryant expands it to include everyday objects, relationships, and fragments of lived experience. This approach gives the work a layered texture, where meaning accumulates gradually through reflection and association.

The book also draws strength from its intertextual connections, particularly in its engagement with the lives and legacies of figures such as Lorraine Hansberry and Octavia E. Butler. These references deepen the narrative, situating personal grief within a broader cultural and historical context.

Overall, Residual is a thoughtful and intellectually engaging work that resists conventional structure in favor of something more fluid and reflective. It is a book that invites careful reading and rewards it with insight into the complexities of memory, loss, and creative expression.