Archipelagos (Peepal Tree Press), the eighth book of poems by US-based Jamaican Geoffrey Philp, begins with a vision of Columbus and his crew arriving in the Caribbean “spurred by fever” for gold and conquest, and ends with a quotation from Bob Marley: “We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.” The poems collected between these poles range far and wide over centuries and continents in a restless but always sharply focused exploration of the multiple connections between colonialism and capitalism, empire and the dilemmas of the Anthropocene era. If the end of the world often feels near at hand in Philp’s elegantly enraged poems, so does the imperative towards a moral reckoning.

In his memoir Song for My Father (Ian Randle Publishers), Grenadian Brian Samuel recounts a family story that is unique but simultaneously typical of complicated, border-crossing Caribbean lives. As Samuel explains, by the time he turned eighteen, he and his two brothers had lived in Grenada, Trinidad, Guyana, Britain, and the United States, but the most consequential disruption came in 1960, when his mother — a Scottish nurse who had migrated to the West Indies with her Grenadian husband — left the family without warning. Samuel’s devotion to his father is clear, as is his sense of the personal transformation that ensued when the now single-parented family moved to Jamaica in 1971, a time of creative and political ferment.

Michael Anthony — now in his tenth decade — is one of the Caribbean’s most beloved writers, especially known for his early novels of childhood set in Mayaro and San Fernando. Mayaro Gold: The Fiction of Michael Anthony (Ian Randle Publishers) by Roydon Salick is, surprisingly, the first book-length study of Anthony’s novels and short stories, and an overdue milestone in Caribbean literary criticism. Salick argues that in his memorable characters, deeply rooted sense of place, and ear for distinctively Trinidadian voices, Anthony offers a politically engaged response to the omissions and distortions of the colonial experience.

Nightmare Island (Scholastic Press), the latest children’s book by Barbadian Shakirah Bourne — a finalist for the 2018 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature — draws on Caribbean mythology to create a thrilling story about family bonds. When her younger brother is taken away for treatment on mysterious Duppy Island, and a haunting silver butterfly from her dreams turns up in the waking world, twelve-year-old Serenity realises something is amiss. It’s up to her to figure out the secrets of Duppy Island, and try to save her beloved sibling.