Notes on her Colour
Many scenes in this powerful novel about race, family dynamics, mental health, trauma and queerness are surprising, thrillingly lustful or abysmally ugly – they will likely burn themselves into the reader’s memory.
more...Tags:
Undrowned
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of the strangest books I have read recently – and I mean that in an extremely positive way. I admit I had to get into it first, but then this unusual way of talking about dolphins, whales, seals and co. in connection with Black experiences won me over.
more...
Crying in H-Mart
In her moving memoir, Zauner recounts the death of her mother Chongmi and her subsequent grieving process, a time during which cooking brought her great comfort.
more...
Decolonization is not (just) a metaphor
One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the key ideas in and around postcolonial studies. In this post, we take a look at an article called “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, published by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in 2012.
more...
An American Marriage
An American Marriage has been Tayari Jones’ literary breakthrough. She takes her readers to the US-American South and offers detailed insights into an unfortunate turn in the lives of a middle-class African-American couple.
more...
poco.lit.‘s top 5 picks in 2022
The editors of poco.lit. share their favorite books of 2022 – five novels by incredibly talented writers from around the world
more...
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is extensive and demanding: The family history of the African American Ailey Pearl Garfield is traced back over several generations and reveals complicated family entanglements that are consequences of settler colonialism and enslavement.
more...
Our missing hearts
Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts takes readers into the near future of the USA. A world of oppression is countered by a certain gentleness, warmth and creativity.
more...
Recitatif
Recitatif is a writerly experiment that sees the acclaimed Toni Morrison toying with her reader as she frames an insightful commentary on racial categorizations. First published in 1983, it is famously the only short story the Nobel-laureate ever wrote.
more...
Between the world and me
Between the world and me is a letter from a father to his son about living in the United States of America in a Black man’s body. There are moments in this book where the beauty of Coates’ prose is quite breath-taking, and the whole is sustained by an intellectual rigour that allows it to shine all the better
more...