Disorientation: Being Black in the World (Random House Canada), the latest book by Giller Prize–winning Trinidad-born writer Ian Williams, is a collection of essays inspired by James Baldwin, “in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas.” Specifically, ideas about race and racism, and how these intersect in sometimes unexpected and uncomfortable ways with other aspects of identity. According to the publishers, Williams offers “a perspective distinct from the almost exclusively America-centric books on race topping the bestseller lists, because of one salient fact: he has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of ‘only’).”

Ring (Coash House Books), the latest novel by Trinidad-born Andre Alexis, is the fifth and final novel in his groundbreaking “Quincunx Cycle”, which began with 2014’s Pastoral. Although the five novels each stand alone, they are linked by recurring characters, locations, situations, and themes. In Ring, Alexis explores the form of literary romance through the relationship between Gwen and Tancred, with elements of the magical, and a poem about the Greek goddess Aphrodite at the book’s heart.

The Voyage (Mawenzi House) is a book of poems by H. Nigel Thomas, the Vincentian-Canadian writer best known for his novels and short stories. Bringing together older and newer poems “culled from a lifetime of meditations on self, family, time, and aging,” the book “also reflects on political and social aspects of human lives, such as hubris, abuse of power, racism, and oppression.”

In Cutlish (Four Way Books), his latest collection of poems, Guyanese-American writer Rajiv Mohabir “creates a form migrated from Caribbean chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker.... By joining the disparate threads of his fading, often derided, multilingual Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Bhojpuri linguistic inheritances, Mohabir mingles the ghosts that haunt from the cane fields his ancestors worked with the canonical colonial education of his elders.”

Aimé Césaire (University of the West Indies Press), a new short biography of the iconic Martiniquan writer by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, is the latest title in UWI Press’s Caribbean Biography Series. A founder of the Négritude movement in the 1930s, Césaire “explored the contours of this African heritage and his complex identity as a Black man born under French rule on the Caribbean island of Martinique,” alongside a long political career.

Cuba: An American History (Scribner) by Ada Ferrer is an epic account of the centuries-long relationship between the Caribbean’s largest island and its powerful neighbour to the north, “written for a moment that demands a new reckoning.” Cuba-born Ferrer, now a professor of history at New York University, “provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonisation, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade.”