In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection's center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles Shanahan's survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother's birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan--queer and mixed-race--confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother's immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of "who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves."

Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption.

Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself.

Gonzalez's poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: "white wine greening in a glass," trumpet blossoms "panicking across the garden." Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place--Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio--all constellated in "a chaos of faraway." The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How doe you reconcile a hatred for the world's pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects? Gonzalez's poems draw us nearer to our own aliveness, its fragility and sustaining questions. "Since I do love the world," she says, she keeps writing, inviting us to accompany her as she searches.

Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak. Skinship is suffused with a profound understanding of humanity and offers a searing look at who the people we love truly are.

In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance, and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human.

To reveal life’s profound influence on the planet, Jabr transports the reader to such extraordinary places as an observatory halfway between the treetops and clouds, an experimental nature reserve in Siberia, and a former gold mine nearly one mile underground. He shows us how Earth became the world we’ve known, how it is rapidly becoming a very different world, and how we will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.

The Cancer Factory tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence. 

Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field's epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom's first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements.