Book cover for The Wanderers by Mphuthumi Ntabeni (Catalyst Press): Ruru’s father, a South African freedom fighter, was exiled to Tanzania before she was born, leaving Ruru and her mother to fend for themselves in the township they called home. So when a fatal bus accident claims her mother’s life, Ruru is adrift. Haunted by her mother’s absence, another loss sits heavy on Ruru’s heart: that of her father, who never returned to the family, or country, he claimed to love. When she learns of his passing, Ruru grieves for the man she never knew, and the answers she would never find. She seeks solace in Tanzania, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with her father’s widow. https://www.catalystpress.org/all-content/the-wanderers
Book cover for Wrecks by Erin L. McCoy (Noemi Press): Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The last two known members of the species were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844. The auk was repeatedly described by those who killed the bird as making human-like gestures and sounds, including sighs. Wrecks investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It explores the colonial systems that drive extinction, and the hierarchical structure by which hegemonic powers decide what is—and what is not—human. It engages the author’s experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers. https://www.noemipress.org/catalog/poetry/wrecks/
Daily(ish) #SmallPress #books: The Wanderers (by Mphuthumi Ntabeni, @catalystpress.bsky.social) & Wrecks (by @erinlmccoy.bsky.social, @noemipress.bsky.social). See alt-text.
#DSPBposts #bookish 💙📚 #BookSky #bookstodon #booktok #booksta #bookstagram #booklovers