Diannely Antigua's debut collection, Ugly Music, is a cacophonous symphony of reality, dream, trauma, and obsession. The poems span a traumatic early childhood, a religious adolescence, and, later, a womanhood that grapples with learning how to create an identity informed by, yet in spite of, those challenges. What follows is an exquisitely vulgar voice, unafraid to draw attention to the distasteful, to speak a truth created by a collage of song and confession, diary and praise. 

Facing his father’s imminent death, and the unresolved conflict between them, Jay Kirk flees on a whirlwind assignment to find a mysterious manuscript in Transylvania before escaping again to the Arctic Circle. A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the value of experience.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant―the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.

Nadia Owusu grew up all over the world—from Rome and London to Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala. After her mother left when she was two and her father’s passing when she was thirteen, she was raised by her stepmother but struggled to come to terms with who she was. Aftershocks follows Nadia as she hauls herself out of turmoil and begins to write her own ground to stand on.

Beast Meridian narrates the experiences of a first-generation Mexican-American girl, tracking cultural displacement, generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker who is expelled and sent to an alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, it survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low-pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinxs in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties.

Opening with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer, and moving into dissociative states, Beast Meridian challenges American notions of “healing” from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a way back toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, and history.

Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It’s a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive. 

Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.  

Each captivating story in Heads of the Colored People plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide—while others are devastatingly poignant—a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper-middle-class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture. Thompson-Spires shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body.