Person Unlimited

By Dean Atta

You’ve fought and you’ve run away.
You’ve danced with other Black queer bodies until sunrise.
Sometimes you wanted to be caught and sometimes you wanted to be held.
With all that you’ve endured, you are nothing less than miraculous.

From choirboy to drag act, grandson to mentor, poet to lover, Dean Atta has played many roles in his life. In this formally inventive, candid and courageous book, he explores what he has carried in his body: wins and losses, shame and pride, pain and joy. Dean also investigates how radical self-acceptance and a willingness to abide with discomfort open up the possibility of a life lived beyond definition: a person unlimited.

Reviews of Person Unlimited

"Such a brave and important book" — SALENA GODDEN

"All memoir is a witness statement. Dean Atta, speak your truth and say it loud" — LEMN SISSAY

"A poet's moving personal testimony of a Black queer life well lived" — PETER TATCHELL

"Healing, sensuous and compellingly insightful" — ALICE HILLER

"This is a tour de force of a book. It takes guts to bear it all like this. Dean does not mince words. In parts I laughed, albeit in gallows humour, was shocked to my core, shed tears and discovered hairs in parts of my body I never knew existed. Person Unlimited is not for the fainthearted; it is brutally honest. It is a testimonial of the fine writer Dean Atta" — ERIC NGALLE CHARLES

"An intricate and deep mosaic of memories . . . Atta writes movingly about his relationship to sex, and with a profound honesty on the long-lasting effects of trauma on the body, not shying away from the ways it has rendered him rageful and irrational, even when the recipient of stable and secure love. Person Unlimited is a book striving not for popularity or praise, but instead for connection and honesty" ― The Skinny