Welcome to In Reading Color, a space where we focus on literature by and about people of color.
A while back, when I was studying for a standardized test, I read a passage that explained how devastating the European invasion was for the North American landscape. The changes in the flora and fauna brought about by the genocide of the Indigenous people is still felt today. It’s interesting, then, to think how we in the West still tend to look at humanity as being so far removed from our surrounding environment. This separation is in part, I think, a result of colonialism as well as monotheistic religion.
With Earth Day having just passed this Saturday and Poetry Month coming to an end, I thought to look at poetry collections that bridge this gap, celebrating the interconnectedness of humans and their respective natural environments, and the cultures that have upheld this connection through their traditions.
Bookish Goods
New Releases
Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton
In the late ’90s, right before the UK hands over Hong Kong to China, biracial 25-year-old Lily is shaken loose from her routine with an inheritance letter from a stranger. The stranger claims to have a connection to her mother Sook-Yin Chen, who was sent from Kowloon to London in 1966 in exile. Though she went with a specific goal, Sook-Yin soon learned that she had to adapt to her new environment in ways that people back home would disapprove of. Chapters alternate as Lily finds out more about her mother, and the “accident” that took her life.
We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White
Tyriek White debuts with a novel that’ll have you thinking of Jesmyn Ward. Over 30 years, White’s East New York family serves their community with a gift that allows them to connect the living and the dead. When Key, Colly’s doula mother, dies unexpectedly, it leaves his grandmother Audrey in a precarious situation. Just as she might lose her public housing as a result, Colly leaves college and starts to come into the ability that is his inheritance. Once he begrudgingly returns to his community, he’ll start to serve as his mother and mother’s mother did before him, tending to spiritual concerns as well as the more tangible, like the neglected housing units of the Brooklyn neighborhood.
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More New Releases
Rosewater by Liv Little (Literary Fiction)
Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many by Mona Gable (True Crime)
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (Nonfiction, History)
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher (Literary Fiction)
That Self-Same Metal by Brittany N. Williams (YA, Mythological Fantasy)
For a more comprehensive list, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert by Ofelia Zepeda
This collection of poems is a landmark literary work by a person from the O’odham Nation. Zepeda tells her story as a Tohono O’odham woman, speaking on the traditional ways as well as how these traditions have influenced modern-day experiences. Through her poems, we see how human nature both ebbs and flows, with the rhythm of the changing seasons, and how it is both nourishing and destructive, like the ocean.
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Diaz won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for this collection. In it, she visits the violences committed against different bodies in the quest for colonialism — human bodies of color as well as various natural bodies, like land and rivers — and reimagines them. From their wounds, she writes in blossoming love and affection; grief and violence turn into joy and pleasure.
Golden Ax by Rio Cortez
Nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry, Golden Ax contains both the past and the present. Cortez tells the story of how her Black ancestors settled the Western United States, showing, in turn, their relationship with the land. Following their trajectory of survival, she also imagines what the future will look like.
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
Limon is a multi award-nominated poet who is currently serving as the U.S. Poet Laureate. In her latest collection, Limón looks at the four seasons and writes joy into the interconnectedness of all beings, giving equal importance to the journey of a garden groundhog as she does human beings.
Thanks for reading; it’s been cute! If you want to reach out and connect, email me at erica@riotnewmedia.com or tweet at me @erica_eze_. You can find me on the Hey YA podcast with the fab Tirzah Price, as well as in the In The Club newsletter.
Until next time,
Erica