The Quiet Ear

“The Quiet Ear is expansive, generous, and massively tender—a beautiful exploration of an interior life grappling with several magnitudes of loss, and what can be found within them.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

“A revelatory exploration of deafness.”—The Bookseller (UK)

“A spellbinding account of [Antrobus’s] youth as a deaf, mixed-race child in East London. . . . With lyrical prose, bruising candor, and remarkable tenderness toward his wounded younger self, Antrobus provides an unforgettable account of finding one’s voice. It’s masterful.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Beautifully complicates and expands our understanding of what deafness is. . . The Quiet Ear has given me new ways to think about the vibration of sound, the movement of language, and the complicated contours of shame. It is a book that changed how I will move through the world.”—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

“Lyrical, moving and powerful.”—Alice Wong, editor of Disability Intimacy and author of Year of the Tiger

“In The Quiet Ear, Raymond Antrobus lifts up a defiant mirror to the mainstream world that has long ignored and shamed the d/Deaf communities and masterfully crafts a world we all deserve: one free of shame, one where deaf people are uplifted, empowered, no longer at the margins of society, but in the center, full of joy and thriving.”—Javier Zamora, author of Solito

“The Quiet Ear is a resounding tribute to deaf artistry, to deaf identity, and to the ways that sound and language—and the boundless universe in between—shape a life. Antrobus writes with lyric clarity and the radiant music of a poet, interrogating the complex histories of British and Jamaican selfhood, the legacy of rootlessness across the diaspora, and what to do with the inheritances we are given. This is a litany to beauty beyond what is spoken. This book is an essential education.”—Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon

“Raymond Antrobus is one of my favorite poets. The Quiet Ear is a marvel, a story of his life as a Deaf man in a society as unjust as ours, which he investigates with clarity, honesty, endless patience, and tenderness for what our world could be.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

“This expansive memoir chronicles Antrobus’s vexed journey across and between the multitudes he contains: his Jamaican heritage and his British one; his blackness and his whiteness; and, again and again, the fraught but ultimately joyful experience of living between hearing and deafness.”—Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Country of the Blind

“The Quiet Ear isn’t simply about hearing; it’s about perception, identity, and the politics of language. Antrobus doesn’t just open our ears—he opens our understanding.”—Dame Evelyn Glennie, Grammy Award–winning musician

“Antrobus’s incredible capacity for documenting the interior is on full show here, traversing not just his griefs and losses but his hopes and joys, too. This book left me transformed.”—Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water

“A journey through language, history and family, The Quiet Ear is a moving and expansive book about the long journey of finding a voice, and the joy and power of using it.”—Séan Hewitt, author of Open, Heaven