Her novel book offers a multiplicity of notes as a rejoinder, assembling memories and observations, artifacts and artworks, tracing the persistence of racism and brutality while also exploring the varieties of Black life … Merciful interruptions, attentive kindnesses, moments of regard: In Sharpe’s book, intimacy and tenderness provide something that resembles hope, though perhaps a more true word would be respite … Ordinary Notes makes full utilize of its form, finding in fragmentation a way to propose and to elaborate, eddying back and forth between cruelty and care, sorrow and joy. A narrative would have presumed an arc, and an arc would have presumed a kind of grand progress that is antithetical to Sharpe’s worldview … Her critique is so radical that it’s only logical for there to be a decidedly apolitical quality to the responses she eventually offers. She finds a measure of solace and recognition in books, in friendship, in poetry, in art.
