The Wanderers (Bathohiya), a dual poetry collection by Satnarine Balkaransingh featuring thirty poems by his late brother Lal Balkaransingh, covers numerous aspects of Indo-Caribbean culture, and more broadly, of the Trinidad and Tobago historical journey since the First Peoples. Drawing on Balkaransingh’s training as a Kathak classical dancer, many of the poems retain innate musicality, and contain performance-based elements. These verses range from profound meditations on the roots of each of T&T’s ethnic groups, to the traditions of East Indian immigrants, representing a generous and expansive view of Caribbean experience.

Sufferah: The Memoir of a Brixton Reggae-Head (Akashic Books), by Alex Wheatle, chronicles the extraordinary life of one of the most renowned Black British writers. Wheatle’s account of his traumatic childhood, tumultuous upbringing, and salvation through reggae music is candid and unsparing. Sufferah does not shy away from the entrenched racism and xenophobia embedded in British culture and politics: in writing of his personal experience of the April 1981 Brixton uprising, Wheatle employs a music-diary style to describe his participation and subsequent imprisonment. 

Bath of Herbs (Peepal Tree Press), the debut poetry collection by Emily Zobel Marshall, is a feminist exploration of self, mixed-race identity, and the healing powers afforded by an immersion in nature. Zobel Marshall, the granddaughter of famed Martiniquan writer Joseph Zobel, explores the repercussions of such an indelible literary legacy, while simultaneously forging and refining her own creative voice. The poet’s childhood in rural Snowdonia, North Wales, draws upon the transformative capacities of nature in its most elemental forms.

Sister Mother Warrior (William Morrow), a new historical novel of the Haitian Revolution by Vanessa Riley, focuses on two indomitable women: Haiti’s first Empress, Marie-Claire Bonheur, and West Africa-born warrior of the rebellion, Gran Toya. Riley purposefully frames infamous historical events through feminist eyes. In so doing, she offers a recalibration of how history is perceived by the women who strongly influenced it, yet often appear less frequently in official archives as compared to their male counterparts. 

Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Colin Channer contains poems that explore etymologies of sound, including elements of confessional, explorative, and philosophical verse. Global in their scope, the narratives of the poems move from New England to the Caribbean, focused on the shifting realities of the Anthropocene with both playfulness and stoicism that avoid a didactic approach. Binding the poems is a sense of memory’s power to both capture and forsake what is truly important, exhorting the reader to pay attention.