As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories.

Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—this memoir takes the form of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow.  

A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, Governing Bodies is a timeless work with profoundly timely relevance.

A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets—with urgent lessons for today.

A scrap of Coleridge’s handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley’s hair. Percy Shelley’s gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats’s calm face. Byron’s silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Mathelinda Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own.

A richly imaginative, powerfully empathetic, and intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men that is also a moving meditation on race, estrangement, and the search for home.

Telling the stories of Ira Aldridge, Matthew Henson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Justin Fashanu, Ekow Eshun pushes the boundaries of genre to capture them in all their complexity, interweaving biography, fiction, historical record, and memoir, sharing his own experiences living as a Black Briton in the art world. The Strangers illuminates both the hostility and the beauty each man encountered in the world, positioning them all within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history, and politics throughout the diaspora.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’ “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Her new poetic and eco-spiritual book carries further the cultural preservation so central to Douglas’ vision. The Shante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters―all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant’s struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter/poem opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And, each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica. 

This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets―or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to "decide/who you must become."

In this panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories—Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool—about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. Thanhauser makes clear how the clothing industry has become one of the planet’s worst polluters and how it relies on chronically underpaid and exploited laborers. But she also shows us how micro-communities, textile companies, and clothing makers in every corner of the world are rediscovering ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear. Drawn from years of intensive research and reporting from around the world, and brimming with fascinating stories, Worn reveals to us that our clothing comes not just from the countries listed on the tags or ready-made from our factories. It comes, as well, from deep in our histories.

Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience―a period known as Optional Practical Training―so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel―to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT―looking for a room to rent, starting her job―she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.

Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.

This collection of innovative, penetrating, and lively essays features swimming pools and poets, road trips and museums, family dinners and celebrity sightings. In a voice that is at once piercing, mournful, and slyly comic, Aisha Sabatini Sloan inhabits several roles: she is an art enthusiast in Los Angeles during a city-wide manhunt; a daughter on a road trip with her father; a professor playing with puppets in the wilds of Vermont; an interloper on a police ride-along in Detroit; a collector of the dreams of scientists at a biostation. As she watches cell phone video recordings of murder and is haunted in her sleep by the news, she reflects on her formative experiences with aesthetic and spiritual discovery, troubling those places where Blackness has been conflated with death.

Sabatini Sloan’s lively style is perfectly suited to the way she circles a subject or an idea before cinching it tight. The curiosity that guides each essay, focusing on the period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic, is rooted in the supposition that there is an intrinsic relationship between the way we conceptualize darkness and our collective opportunity for awakening.

Karisma Price’s stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to Night,'” If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.”