Best Books for Adults 2023

7 Books Found

Filtered by 'Identity'
  • The Kingdom of Surfaces

    Mao writes to escape being "trapped in someone else's imagination," literally shaping poems that challenge empire, cultural plunder, and the ongoing violence Asian people experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, both in the U.S. and her birthplace of Wuhan.

    Cover of The Kingdom of Surfaces
  • No Sweet Without Brine

    Manick embraces Black womanhood in poems that reference personal experience, social circumstance, and sources that range from familial diaries to Jet magazine. The resulting collection is a work that makes the personal a universal read.

    Cover of No Sweet Without Brine
  • Promises of Gold

    Olivarez reps both his Mexican American heritage and Chicago homeland in this bilingual collection that addresses immigration, capitalism, community, and belonging, writing poems that pay homage to love in all its many forms.

    Cover of Promises of Gold
  • Quiet: Poems

    Quiet boldly explores Black interiority, intimacy, and selfhood, navigating the tension between guarding one's inner life and the realization that silence is not protection. The tone of these poems reflects perfectly the often-fraught negotiation between one's internal self and the surrounding world.

    Cover of Quiet: Poems
  • Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco

    Combining elegy and fantasy, this collection memorializes a youthful relationship and a former lover's eventual suicide. These wistful, ethereal, and sorrowful poems are both a love letter to the Beloved and also an elegy for an imagined youth free of abuse, homophobia, and fear.

    Cover of Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco
  • Side Notes from the Archivist: Poems

    Anastacia-Reneé fearlessly explores the complexities of Black femme lives across time, space, and reality with an unapologetically feminist voice through these poems. This is an eclectic, well-curated archive of Black femme culture-making.

    Cover of Side Notes from the Archivist: Poems
  • Unshuttered: Poems

    Smith reanimates the static images of 19th-century photographs of Black men, women, and children in these ekphrastic poems that imagine lives of dignity and totality. The collection creates an intimacy with the past that resonates long after its pages are shut.

    Cover of Unshuttered: Poems