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Kiss the Scars on the Back of my Neck
Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck is a sizzling story collection that introduces readers to complicated characters, male and female, who find themselves at the crossroads of Black Life in America, illustrating the challenges they face, and the price they pay, to live authentic lives.
The eclectic stories in this collection are bound by the threads of desire in its many forms, above all, the desire for love and a place of safety in world where being Black and gay can thwart the fulfillment of that longing. The characters are complex, driven, difficult, and even, at times, unsympathetic, but always compelling. In other words: fully rounded human beings living complicated lives.
A proud Black woman who escaped her rural, impoverished town returns after the collapse of her marriage and faces the scorn of those she left behind. A middle-aged gay man finds his loneliness temporarily relieved by the arrival of a stray cat. An unhappily married woman becomes enmeshed in her bisexual husband’s attempt to create a ménage à trois with a much younger man. A 16-year-old boy discovers the power of his sexuality when he embarks upon a dangerous seduction. Two Black men, one mature and rich, the other young and struggling, are drawn into a contentious affair by their shared love of opera. The legendary blues singer Glady Bentley crashes up against the barriers of race and gender when she gets caught up in a police raid.
The eclectic stories in this collection are bound by the threads of desire in its many forms, above all, the desire for love and a place of safety in world where being Black and gay can thwart the fulfillment of that longing. The characters are complex, driven, difficult, and even, at times, unsympathetic, but always compelling. In other words: fully rounded human beings living complicated lives.
A proud Black woman who escaped her rural, impoverished town returns after the collapse of her marriage and faces the scorn of those she left behind. A middle-aged gay man finds his loneliness temporarily relieved by the arrival of a stray cat. An unhappily married woman becomes enmeshed in her bisexual husband’s attempt to create a ménage à trois with a much younger man. A 16-year-old boy discovers the power of his sexuality when he embarks upon a dangerous seduction. Two Black men, one mature and rich, the other young and struggling, are drawn into a contentious affair by their shared love of opera. The legendary blues singer Glady Bentley crashes up against the barriers of race and gender when she gets caught up in a police raid.
- GenresLGBTShort StoriesQueer
220 pages, Paperback
Published August 10, 2021
About the author
Joe Okonkwo
9 books70 followersJoe’s debut novel
Jazz Moon
won the Publishing Triangle's prestigious Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, has called Jazz Moon “A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris — a moving story of traveling far to find oneself.”
Joe's short stories have appeared in Newtown Literary, Global City Review, The Piltdown Review, The New Engagement, Storychord, Shotgun Honey, Love Stories from Africa, Best Gay Stories 2015, and Strength. His short story “Cleo” earned a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Joe served as prose editor for Newtown Literary, a journal dedicated to nurturing writers from Queens, New York. He edited Best Gay Stories 2017. Joe has led creative writing workshops at Gotham Writers' Workshop, Newtown Literary/Queens Library, and the Bronx Council on the Arts. He has served on the planning committee for the Provincetown Book Festival.
Joe's story collection, Kiss the Scars on the Back of my Neck , was published by Amble Press. It has been been lauded by noted author William J. Mann who calls Kiss the Scars “A remarkable examination of the human condition.”
He is represented by the Baldi Literary Agency and is currently at work on a new novel called King Gladys.
Joe Okonkwo lives and writes in Queens, New York City.
#KissTheScars
#JazzMoonNovel
Joe's short stories have appeared in Newtown Literary, Global City Review, The Piltdown Review, The New Engagement, Storychord, Shotgun Honey, Love Stories from Africa, Best Gay Stories 2015, and Strength. His short story “Cleo” earned a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Joe served as prose editor for Newtown Literary, a journal dedicated to nurturing writers from Queens, New York. He edited Best Gay Stories 2017. Joe has led creative writing workshops at Gotham Writers' Workshop, Newtown Literary/Queens Library, and the Bronx Council on the Arts. He has served on the planning committee for the Provincetown Book Festival.
Joe's story collection, Kiss the Scars on the Back of my Neck , was published by Amble Press. It has been been lauded by noted author William J. Mann who calls Kiss the Scars “A remarkable examination of the human condition.”
He is represented by the Baldi Literary Agency and is currently at work on a new novel called King Gladys.
Joe Okonkwo lives and writes in Queens, New York City.
#KissTheScars
#JazzMoonNovel
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
Did Not Finish
May 12, 2022I read about half the stories and just wasn’t feeling it. By its high overall rating on Goodreads, I am obviously in the minority but most of the ones I read struck me as banal at best, and left me cold. Only the second story, “Skin,“ resonated — and did it ever. Still, with so many other duds, I bailed at the 45% mark.
August 31, 2021
This book thoroughly entertained me. Okonkwo is a great writer—dark, elegant and provoking. “Gift Shop” ranks as my favorite of the nine stories that make up Kiss the Scars in the Back of My Neck but the care given to Okonkwo’s characters, the cleanliness of his prose and the vast colors of his description make them all worth at least one read. I cringed. I gasped. I loved this book.
August 11, 2021
This review has been published on Rainbow Book Reviews.
This! I repeat: this! Definitely. This is how short stories should be written. Each one rounded and anchored in itself, economical with time and space, each almost sparingly deploying just as many scenes as necessary, with a raw intensity pulsing within, and written in that simple prose which, most authors will surely concur, is the most difficult writing goal to achieve. This collection, requested and opened with no precise expectancy whatsoever because I didn’t know the author yet, has made it immediately into the list of my Five Favorite Books Ever (yes, with capital letters), and I urge you to grab a copy. If I had needed any further push, what positively captured me at the end and what I hadn’t seen coming was the clever detail that some of these stories, when put together, created a deeper, almost novel-like arc where the different plots and caracters were finally interwoven in the last and longest story that gave the whole collection its name.
While it always strikes me as difficult to give a succinct summary for a short story collection, here many main characters pop up in several stories, so I should start with Justene Crane, a young, black woman. In ‘Picnic Street’, she has just left her husband, who doesn’t desire her any longer, and moved back from Michigan to her home town in Mississippi together with her nine-year-old son Paulie. Living in her sister’s house, she struggles to make ends meet, which strikes her as all the more important as she is pregnant again—and not from her first son’s father. Paulie comes back as a main character in the third story, ‘Paulie’, which amongst other things shows his artistical and sexual awakening. In the fifth story, ‘The Girls’ Table’, the reader meets young Cedric, who is growing up in Queens. He is a skinny, friendless black kid whom the other boys frequently bully because they sense his difference. These two characters are brought back in the last story, where Paulie turns out to have become a hunky, well-off, renowned painter whereas bisexual Cedric struggles to make his on-and-off relationship with his girlfriend work. After the two men meet in the Metropolitan Opera (at least I presume it’s the Met), a Pygmalion-like love story begins, and its ups and downs give the reader a deeper look into the two characters. Apart from these, there are five other excellent and original short stories.
What I expect from short stories, what I hope they will do, is that they plunge me into the exceptional situation someone is experiencing and make me live it from the inside. Okonkwo has done a formidable “job” here because that is exactly what I got. When a short story is badly told or clumsily constructed, I always have the nagging sensation either that there should be more (which means that the content should have been done in the form of a novel) or much less (meaning the story has not been stripped of its unnecessary parts down to the bare essentials underlining the poignancy of the situation that is shown). Writing efficient short stories is maybe the hardest thing an author can attempt (apart from good poetry, that is) exactly because there are these rules, these laws one is supposed to respect; I have mentioned them already: a situation with some sort of culmination being the center part, plus economy of characters, scenes, time, and space. You drag on too much with fore- and afterstory, so to say, you delve too deep into the central character or remain too much on the surface, you can’t refrain from baroque verbosity, and the result will be unsatisfying.
Joe Okonkwo has found the perfect balance of all these ingredients to make me thoroughly enjoy each story. That in itself is very rare, too—quite often, in a collection, I like maybe half of them, finding the rest barely okay. But here, the nine parts, if they don’t form a whole the way a novel would, have something in common, apart from the excellent writing—our human condition, the effort it takes to be ourselves, the dichotomy between our being and society’s expectations. Most stories evolve around black characters—one of them is even told in the dialect or lingo (I’m no linguist so I couldn’t tell you what to call it) spoken by many American blacks (this is not meant in a disdainful or racist way—I’ve grown up speaking one of the countless Austrian dialects, only learned “proprer” German in school, and am very proud of my roots), which made it all the more poignant in my eyes. What I really appreciated was that the author allowed me to slip into all these characters’ lives and enable me to relate to, even identify with them despite the experiences I haven’t and will probably never have (I’ll never be black, I’ll never be a woman, I’ll never be lesbian) because he succeeded in making them feel universal.
I’ve genuinely loved Joe Okonkwo’s style and direct voice; I’ll certainly check out his other publications, namely his first novel as well as the gay short story collection he edited in 2017.
This! I repeat: this! Definitely. This is how short stories should be written. Each one rounded and anchored in itself, economical with time and space, each almost sparingly deploying just as many scenes as necessary, with a raw intensity pulsing within, and written in that simple prose which, most authors will surely concur, is the most difficult writing goal to achieve. This collection, requested and opened with no precise expectancy whatsoever because I didn’t know the author yet, has made it immediately into the list of my Five Favorite Books Ever (yes, with capital letters), and I urge you to grab a copy. If I had needed any further push, what positively captured me at the end and what I hadn’t seen coming was the clever detail that some of these stories, when put together, created a deeper, almost novel-like arc where the different plots and caracters were finally interwoven in the last and longest story that gave the whole collection its name.
While it always strikes me as difficult to give a succinct summary for a short story collection, here many main characters pop up in several stories, so I should start with Justene Crane, a young, black woman. In ‘Picnic Street’, she has just left her husband, who doesn’t desire her any longer, and moved back from Michigan to her home town in Mississippi together with her nine-year-old son Paulie. Living in her sister’s house, she struggles to make ends meet, which strikes her as all the more important as she is pregnant again—and not from her first son’s father. Paulie comes back as a main character in the third story, ‘Paulie’, which amongst other things shows his artistical and sexual awakening. In the fifth story, ‘The Girls’ Table’, the reader meets young Cedric, who is growing up in Queens. He is a skinny, friendless black kid whom the other boys frequently bully because they sense his difference. These two characters are brought back in the last story, where Paulie turns out to have become a hunky, well-off, renowned painter whereas bisexual Cedric struggles to make his on-and-off relationship with his girlfriend work. After the two men meet in the Metropolitan Opera (at least I presume it’s the Met), a Pygmalion-like love story begins, and its ups and downs give the reader a deeper look into the two characters. Apart from these, there are five other excellent and original short stories.
What I expect from short stories, what I hope they will do, is that they plunge me into the exceptional situation someone is experiencing and make me live it from the inside. Okonkwo has done a formidable “job” here because that is exactly what I got. When a short story is badly told or clumsily constructed, I always have the nagging sensation either that there should be more (which means that the content should have been done in the form of a novel) or much less (meaning the story has not been stripped of its unnecessary parts down to the bare essentials underlining the poignancy of the situation that is shown). Writing efficient short stories is maybe the hardest thing an author can attempt (apart from good poetry, that is) exactly because there are these rules, these laws one is supposed to respect; I have mentioned them already: a situation with some sort of culmination being the center part, plus economy of characters, scenes, time, and space. You drag on too much with fore- and afterstory, so to say, you delve too deep into the central character or remain too much on the surface, you can’t refrain from baroque verbosity, and the result will be unsatisfying.
Joe Okonkwo has found the perfect balance of all these ingredients to make me thoroughly enjoy each story. That in itself is very rare, too—quite often, in a collection, I like maybe half of them, finding the rest barely okay. But here, the nine parts, if they don’t form a whole the way a novel would, have something in common, apart from the excellent writing—our human condition, the effort it takes to be ourselves, the dichotomy between our being and society’s expectations. Most stories evolve around black characters—one of them is even told in the dialect or lingo (I’m no linguist so I couldn’t tell you what to call it) spoken by many American blacks (this is not meant in a disdainful or racist way—I’ve grown up speaking one of the countless Austrian dialects, only learned “proprer” German in school, and am very proud of my roots), which made it all the more poignant in my eyes. What I really appreciated was that the author allowed me to slip into all these characters’ lives and enable me to relate to, even identify with them despite the experiences I haven’t and will probably never have (I’ll never be black, I’ll never be a woman, I’ll never be lesbian) because he succeeded in making them feel universal.
I’ve genuinely loved Joe Okonkwo’s style and direct voice; I’ll certainly check out his other publications, namely his first novel as well as the gay short story collection he edited in 2017.
September 11, 2021
A masterfully written and curated collection of previously published short stories and some new ones. The standout for me was the title story Kiss the Scars. Really great. Other standouts were Gift Shop, Paulie, and You Can't Do That to Gladys Bentley! Highly recommended.
October 9, 2021
Joe Okonkwo’s writing voice, his astute craft. Just my literary vibe: always keen observations of how sociology, psychology, politics, race, gender, and sexual identity impacts self-awareness. Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck, is no exception. These stunning short stories elicit strong emotions from the reader; they deliver a kaleidoscope of fascinating, heartfelt, gritty, and tender-hearted characters who navigate the complexities of intimacy and yearning for connection. Bravo!
November 12, 2021
Impressive collection. I'm looking forward to reading Jazz Moon soon.
November 14, 2024
This collection of stories, though, made me FEEL. It made me laugh, it made my chest ache, it made me want to hug the characters. Beautiful, funny, confident queer
Black souls.
If you enjoyed God's Children Are Little Broken Things, you WILL love this one! And it's not half as traumatic-just pure, beautiful short fiction with wonderful, direct writing and real, raw humanness. With queer and Black fiction, there's often this undertone of sadness and agony (which is real, and I get it), but I love that this book captures tender, insecure, even fatal moments of being Black and queer without relying only on pain.
Black souls.
If you enjoyed God's Children Are Little Broken Things, you WILL love this one! And it's not half as traumatic-just pure, beautiful short fiction with wonderful, direct writing and real, raw humanness. With queer and Black fiction, there's often this undertone of sadness and agony (which is real, and I get it), but I love that this book captures tender, insecure, even fatal moments of being Black and queer without relying only on pain.
October 8, 2021
As lyrical as it is literary…
Joe Okonkwo’s collection of short stories read like arias about love and consequence. We meet a cadenza of characters: lovers, haters, bullies, snobs and opportunists— an all-supporting cast for our beloved diva, Paul Crane, and his understudy, Cedric Curtis, as they traverse the stage of society’s expectations, crooning their woes about class, gender, sexuality and race in unique voices and tempos.
While there are a few stand-alones that hit the high A— most notably “Skin,” and “Cleo,” both about men and the hazards of pickups— it’s best to read these greatest hits straight through to their dramatic finish.
A performance in thought-provoking prose, each song of this book reminds us there is no hiding from the human condition —not even in the nosebleed seats.
Bravo, Joe O! Bravissimo!
Recommend reading once for story, then again as encore, listening to the suggested playlist in the back.
Joe Okonkwo’s collection of short stories read like arias about love and consequence. We meet a cadenza of characters: lovers, haters, bullies, snobs and opportunists— an all-supporting cast for our beloved diva, Paul Crane, and his understudy, Cedric Curtis, as they traverse the stage of society’s expectations, crooning their woes about class, gender, sexuality and race in unique voices and tempos.
While there are a few stand-alones that hit the high A— most notably “Skin,” and “Cleo,” both about men and the hazards of pickups— it’s best to read these greatest hits straight through to their dramatic finish.
A performance in thought-provoking prose, each song of this book reminds us there is no hiding from the human condition —not even in the nosebleed seats.
Bravo, Joe O! Bravissimo!
Recommend reading once for story, then again as encore, listening to the suggested playlist in the back.
October 31, 2021
Fantastic.
April 23, 2026
My fave was Paulie
June 19, 2026
I love a compilation of short stories, and this one is truly amazing. Favorite of the month, top 5 of the year so far, can recommend as an easy gift for the coolest person you know.
November 25, 2024
I'm also published with Amble, and I've been working my way through their other books over the past months. The line-up is generally of excellent quality, but when it comes to Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck I can only say... wow. Honestly, I don't know how to comment on this book without sounding bombastic but... wow. I've read a several well-written short story collections lately, many of which have been excellent, but Kiss the Scars may be the only one where I've truly loved every single tale.
I once read that reading fiction is good for mental health, awakening your sense of curiosity and empathy, and I've found no recent example that demonstrates this better than Okonkwo's collection. It left me feeling alive and alert to the world around me. Every character feels authentic. The stories have a level of depth and dimension that made them seem like real-life re-tellings. People and their situations are exposed in all their hideous beauty, and never with a sense of judgment, never with a narrative that tells you what or how to think.
Kiss the Scars weaves multiple narratives together over its stories, giving us insight into individual lives across decades, exploring the ways in which we're reared – the things we're exposed to, the issues we struggle with – can come together to form the people we are today. I can't say if I really loved or hated Paulie, for example, or Cedric (or even liked or disliked them), but that isn't the point. They existed and they fascinated me. Who they were made sense, and I couldn't get enough of their lives. Okwonko exhibits true artistry with his work, demonstrating a sensitivity that seriously inspires me as a fellow writer.
Perhaps this review is overly glowing, but I truly don't care. Good work should be celebrated. I loved Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck, and you will too.
I once read that reading fiction is good for mental health, awakening your sense of curiosity and empathy, and I've found no recent example that demonstrates this better than Okonkwo's collection. It left me feeling alive and alert to the world around me. Every character feels authentic. The stories have a level of depth and dimension that made them seem like real-life re-tellings. People and their situations are exposed in all their hideous beauty, and never with a sense of judgment, never with a narrative that tells you what or how to think.
Kiss the Scars weaves multiple narratives together over its stories, giving us insight into individual lives across decades, exploring the ways in which we're reared – the things we're exposed to, the issues we struggle with – can come together to form the people we are today. I can't say if I really loved or hated Paulie, for example, or Cedric (or even liked or disliked them), but that isn't the point. They existed and they fascinated me. Who they were made sense, and I couldn't get enough of their lives. Okwonko exhibits true artistry with his work, demonstrating a sensitivity that seriously inspires me as a fellow writer.
Perhaps this review is overly glowing, but I truly don't care. Good work should be celebrated. I loved Kiss the Scars on the Back of My Neck, and you will too.
December 6, 2022
I made the awful decision of judging a book by the cover and was initially beguiled by the title and the image. Unfortunately, too much of the writing centered around self-hating characters for me to stomach this book. While I enjoyed a grand total of 2 of the short stories, too many of them made me physically cringe with the way the characters were depicted or acted for me to consciously rate this book any higher than one star. There were so many characters that I believed were a Mary-Sue for the author, which lead me to believe I would find him insufferable. Overall, very disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews