Award-winning poet and writer Kei Miller examines the silence in which so many significant things are maintained in this poignant and poetic collection of essays. Through this silence, he explores the experience of discrimination and what it means to break it: to risk words and facts. And he thinks about the histories that our bodies carry, the atrocities that haunt them, and how meaning might change as we travel the world, assuming various roles such as victim or privileged. Miller vividly and forcefully describes commonplace instances of racism and discrimination through letters to James Baldwin, interactions with Derek Walcott, Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, and more. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.