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This wonderful collection of Pinckney’s previously published writing on everything from Black intellectual history to post-Trump white supremacy is an excellent introduction to the author’s range and critical brilliance, but will be equally welcomed by fans of Pinckney’s fiction who are craving erudite examinations of American history grounded in the author’s singular biography and vision.

This short book about Harriet Tubman is like a (very good) children’s book for adults — character-driven, peppy, and excellent for people who know little about Tubman beyond her name and work for the Underground Railroad. Using illustrations and a conversational tone girded by Dunbar’s obvious scholarship, She Came to Slay takes readers through Tubman’s experiences, with a special focus on the importance of faith in her life’s trajectory.

Mayhew’s hazy, vivid paintings of the American landscape — with a special focus on trees — are beautiful and dreamy and, yes, transcendent. Mayhew is famous for his creative process, which is intuitive and inspired by improvisational jazz, resulting in lush, color-saturated canvases that contain traces of his musicianship, Afro-Native roots, and interest in Abstract Expressionism. The dozens of paintings featured in Transcendence are accompanied by an in-depth interview with the artist, making this a must-have for Mayhew fans and anyone with even a passing interest in landscape painting and contemporary art history.

In Slave Play, three biracial couples attend a therapy session in which they role-play the master-slave relationship in order to explore why the Black partners aren’t finding sex with their white partners pleasurable. When staged, mirrors reflect the audience’s responses to scenes of abasement and uncomfortable shows of self-conscious white tolerance, experiences that the script alone is strong enough to convey to the reader. Slave Play takes something Americans view as very private, sex and sexual violation, and uses it to parse something else we don’t like to talk about, which is the way people of color can find themselves stuck between a liberal white world that accepts via erasure and an intolerant white world in which one is defined by difference. Harris doesn’t offer guidance or solutions here, but there’s no question that Slave Play is a valuable jumping-off point for important and uncomfortable conversations about interpersonal race relations.

Before you decide, Enough Powell’s, I’m not going to read a microhistory of street addresses, think about the social and monetary value of a street address. Without a fixed address, it’s difficult for a person to receive mail, obtain credit, open a bank account, or apply for government assistance. In her surprisingly fascinating survey of global street addresses, Dierdre Mask explores how much street names and street addresses (or their absence), from Kolkata, India, to the southern United States, reveal about the people who live there, and their positions within their greater communities.

Wilderson’s memoir/treatise on Afro-pessimism interrogates many of the same issues as Slave Play, but from an interesting fusion of personal stories and dense academic theory. Afro-pessimism, according to Wilderson, posits that Black people have been, currently are, and probably will remain forced into a kind of Derridian binary of the human condition; they must be the subjugated partner, or slave, in all interracial relationships (at the individual and societal levels) in order for non-Blacks to define themselves as human. This view on the global necessity of anti-Black violence is radical and not especially pragmatic — it’s an acknowledgement and exploration of the status quo rather than a challenge to it — but Wilderson’s arguments and accounts of the racism he’s experienced are gripping and likely to foster lively debate.

We were fans of Morgan Jerkins’s debut This Will Be My Undoing, a beautifully written, vulnerable reflection on her development as a cultural critic, and are very excited about her forthcoming investigation of The Great Migration. Tracing her family’s history back 300 years, Jerkins uses oral histories and her ancestors’ physical routes through the United States to examine how migrating north profoundly altered her family’s sense of identity, and Black culture and identity at large.

Buddhist and social activist Lama Rod Owens bucks the Buddhist norm to advocate for the positive value of anger in creating lasting social change. This is especially important for communities of color, whose anger is often demonized and regarded as a threat rather than a legitimate call for redress. Though not identical to Gandhi’s idea of satyagraha, readers interested in nonviolent resistance or seeking examples and instruction in harnessing anger for personal and social good will find Love and Rage an absorbing and useful work.

Smith’s new poetry collection is an elegy and ode to the life-sustaining intimacy and joys of friendship. As in their earlier work, Smith’s ability to fuse colloquial speech with raw emotion and formal discipline is unparalleled; it is impossible not to be moved by the deep wells of celebration and loss that fill every space of Smith’s poems. When one poem’s speaker reflects, “my friend! my friends! my niggas! my wives! / i got a crush on each one of your dumb faces / smashing into my heart like idiot cardinals into glass / but i am a big-ass glass bird, a stupid monster / crashing through the window & becoming / it just to make you laugh,” one can’t help but envy the speaker’s friends, or Smith’s singular way of articulating what are for most of us inexpressible sentiments of grief and joy.

Magical Negro is an awe-inspiring work. It’s a howl into a country that doesn’t value Black bodies. It’s a laugh-and-cry late night with a girlfriend who’s dated too many hipsters. It’s a meticulously framed window into the dangerous frustrations of Black womanhood, and the society that reinforces those dangers. It is a startlingly generous invitation into Parker’s vulnerabilities. And it’s a book of challenging, brilliant poems that demand a slow crawl through the text, so your mind becomes as saturated with understanding as your heart is with feeling.

Darkly funny but steeped in grief, Hanif Abdurraqib’s stunning poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster, reckons with the violence of the world and the violence that fills the hollows grief has carved inside the poems’ speaker. For the speaker, who is by turns grateful for emptiness and filled with desire, love, death, memory, and forgetting are both curses and choices: it is possible to take action toward forgetting, but the ghost of lost love haunts that act; as Abdurraqib’s poems make clear, heartbreak is what motivates forgetting and it’s what‘s waiting when the distraction ends. Abdurraqib’s heartfelt and painstaking A Fortune for Your Disaster rose to the top of poetry titles released in 2019, buoyed as much by its technical mastery as by its author’s hard-won grace.

Like Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, jessica Care moore’s We Want Our Bodies Back centers on the Black female experience, zeroing in on how Black women shelter themselves from misogyny, racism, objectification, and assault. Frequently hailed as a resistance writer (Tony Bolden, Tongo Eisen Martin), the power of Moore’s work is concentrated in the poet’s ability to encompass and condense the history and present of racist acts upon Black bodies and minds into unambiguous, lyrical calls for justice. In Michael Eric Dyson’s words, “Moore carries on the heroic tradition of our greatest artists who make epic verse out of tragedy and adversity.” We Want Our Bodies Back is required reading.