The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.

School of Instructions centers on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during World War I. The poem gathers the psychic and physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theater and refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. Simultaneity abounds: the narratives of the soldiers overlap with that of Godspeed, a young schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, written in a form Ishion Hutchinson calls “contrapuntal versets,” unsettles time and event. It reshapes grand gestures of heroism into a music of supple, vigilant intensity. The triumph of School of Instructions is how it confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and etches shards of remembrances into a form of survival.

American women―American wives―have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. In Saigon in 1963, Tricia and Charlene form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering as they do how their own lives as women on the periphery have been shaped and burdened by America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul—searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new terminology of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, and the distance between Time Ago and Soon, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment and offers a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other and to the future.

In 2001, a few months after the death of her husband, Angela is devastated when she is ejected from her graduate program in linguistics. The young widow and her four-year-old child move into her mother’s house, and Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization utilizing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-eight-year-old patient, and their relationship soon turns intimate. When Sam’s family discovers their relationship, they intervene and bring charges. As Angela tells her story from prison, we are plunged into the inner workings of her mind as she rejects all else in pursuit of a more profound understanding of language and humanity.

In this collection, Shane McCrae expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career. McCrae invites readers to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. He also creates landscapes where Homeric figures mingle with those who populate the poet’s world. Helen weighs Paris’s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas’s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience. In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. As Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. As Safiya’s voice grows, poetically, a collision course is set between them.

Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. Desperate for money―and survival―Matt teams up with his best friend and business partner Alix Variel, the adventurous only son of a socially prominent Haitian family. Their ambition and exploration of disastrous shipwrecks come with a cascade of ill-fated incidents―one that involves Misha, Alix’s erudite sister, who stumbles onto an arms-trafficking ring masquerading as a U.S. government humanitarian aid office, and rookie CIA case officer Audrey O’Donnell, who finds herself doing clandestine work on an assignment that proves to be more difficult and dubious than she could have possibly imagined.

The comet, Cain, came from beyond our solar system, its debris containing elements unknown. Now, in the isolated region of Fairbanks, Alaska, the skies shift and stretch as an interstellar dust cloud seeds the atmosphere. When a plane shudders its way through pulpy, swirling, bruise-shaped clouds, lit with sudden cracks of lightning, the sky opens and the aircraft vanishes…but only for a minute. When the flight lands, everyone on board and in the community will be changed forever. The answer to the comet’s origin is about to be unveiled, and its impact on Earth is more treacherous and sublime than humanity could imagine.