Sanctuaries of Invention (Peepal Tree Press), the sixth collection of poems by Trinidadian writer Jennifer Rahim — winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — tackles up-to-the-moment subjects like the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate change crisis, while meditating on bigger questions of time, human nature, and how our lives are shaped by specific geographies and histories. The book also testifies to the power of language and literature to transcend the present: “Words fly the grave, steal / the only thunder a virus can claim, / and, alive, / witness to goodness that quietly thrives.”

Monster in the Middle (Penguin Random House), the second novel by USVI-born Tiphanie Yanique, traces family histories across decades to “map the emotional inheritance” of a young couple in love in New York City. Ranging from the Caribbean to West Africa to the US, charting “family lore and love stories” across generations, the novel “posits that in order to answer the question ‘who are we meant to be with?’ we must first understand who we are and how we came to be.”

A Plethora of Dead Ends (Notion Press) by Lance Dowrich — winner of the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region — is a short fiction collection with a comic twist, examining the twists and absurdities of life in the contemporary Caribbean. His main character, Ethelbert G. Sandiford, “navigates through his dead-end life with a mixture of luck and ingenuity” — resulting in chuckles for the reader.

The Annual Migration of Clouds (ECW Press) by Caribbean-Canadian Premee Mohamed is a “post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella” set in the prairie province of Alberta in the aftermath of a climate disaster, where “a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community.” At its heart is a mediation on family, belonging, and the future.

Matters Arising (Royards) by Kenneth Ramchand collects a number of the eminent literary scholar’s newspaper columns originally published in the Trinidad Guardian, ranging in subject from books, writers, and culture more broadly to politics, sports, and current affairs. Trenchantly argued and full of insights, this volume reminds the reader what doing intellectual work in public can look like in the Caribbean.

Nature’s Wild: Love Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press) by Trinidad-born Andil Gosine “engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean.” Chapters range from recounting the author’s experiences at an all-boys secondary school in Trinidad to examining the work of LGBT activist Colin Robinson and artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, along with legal cases in support of LGBT rights in Trinidad and Guyana — “calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like.”