Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
Lightning in Our Roots by Avis Blackbird
In Lightning in Our Roots, Avis Blackbird invites the reader on a journey to feel Indigenous fluidity of space and time, the impact of colonization, enduring connections to the land, lived urbanized experience, and finally the rising hope of Indigenous communities and cultures to thrive. Inspired by Tommy Pico and Kae Tempest, these short lyric poems draw from Blackbird’s personal experiences of her youth in the city, removed from Indigenous traditions, to her adulthood, where she and her family healed their connection to their cultural pride.
The underlying sentiment of strength and love defies the injustices inflicted upon communities for generations. Her poetry is wholehearted as she soars in the company of birds and reconnects to her ancestral Salish heritage. As she imagines a rightful place for youth waiting in the wings, the ancestors dance with her.
I Did Not Come for Peace; Problems, Always! by Maria Oluwabukola Oni
In the relentless energy of Lagos, peace is a luxury no one can afford. Maria Oluwabukola Oni’s debut collection delivers seventeen razor-sharp stories that plunge straight into the chaos, gossip, ambition, trauma, and dark comedy of contemporary Nigerian life.
Written with unflinching honesty, mordant humor, and a keen ear for Lagos street slang, Yoruba idioms, and Nigerian Pidgin, these stories refuse sentimentality. They show life exactly as it is—messy, vivid, often hilarious, and always complicated. Oni offers no easy resolutions, only the clear-eyed recognition that problems, always, are the true constant.
An Earth Full of Gratitude: A Collection of Poems by Ranjith Sivaraman
Reading An Earth Full of Gratitude by Ranjith Sivaraman is like entering a soft dusk where moonlight and incense meet—an intimacy that wants to be felt before it is named. This is a collection of poems that merges nature imagery, human emotions, and human psychology into a gorgeous tapestry of philosophy. Representing minute details of romantic intensities with a strong conviction in the truth of love, the poems register small bodily truths: waiting without agitation, noticing expression before speech, sensing emotion before it is spoken. In a world thick with facades, these pages offer a soft insistence that true love—patient, pink, demanding, forgiving—still takes root. Sivaraman’s feminine imagery—craving, moon, mist, tender lap—meets male desire—wolf, howl, hunger, strength, determination—not to reduce love to bodies, but to show how eros and eros’s restraint braid into devotion; where science maps neurotransmitters, this book maps the soul’s circuitry. This book does not explain devotion; it is devotion—an earthly, luminous practice, guide, contribution, and gratitude to love. In short, this collection is an elegy and a laboratory both—where pain and joy are braided, and the final finding is as beautiful and simple as true love.
VAGABOND CITY 