sipèstisyon unflinchingly navigates generational trauma, migration, and spirituality. In this powerful debut, Haitian-American poet Mckendy Fils-Aimé examines wounds left by abuse, familial estrangement, and racial violence. Through the lens of Haitian superstitions, sipèstisyon explores the imperfect and non-linear nature of healing. These poems don’t pretend that moving on is as simple as moving on. They know that mending a wound requires understanding its shape and origin and that confrontation is sometimes necessary. In each poem, sipèstisyon asks which is louder: the sound of our ache or the call to forgive?

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family. Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.

Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a Madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his fear of going to bed at night. He is a creature of habit and dislikes waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he is. He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.

In a future hammered by climate change and drought, mountain snows have turned to rain, and rain evaporates before it hits the ground. In a fragmenting United States, the cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas skirmish for a dwindling share of the Colorado River. But it is the Las Vegas water knives - assassins, terrorists and spies - who are legendary for protecting Las Vegas' water supplies, and for ensuring Phoenix's ruin. When rumours of a game-changing water source surface, Las Vegas dispatches elite water knife Angel Velasquez to Phoenix to investigate. There, he discovers hardened journalist Lucy Monroe, who holds the secret to the water source Angel seeks. But Angel isn't the only one hunting for water, Lucy is no pushover, and the death of a despised water knife is a small price to pay in return for the life-giving flow of a river.

sipèstisyon unflinchingly navigates generational trauma, migration, and spirituality. In this powerful debut, Haitian-American poet Mckendy Fils-Aimé examines wounds left by abuse, familial estrangement, and racial violence. Through the lens of Haitian superstitions, sipèstisyon explores the imperfect and non-linear nature of healing. These poems don’t pretend that moving on is as simple as moving on. They know that mending a wound requires understanding its shape and origin and that confrontation is sometimes necessary. In each poem, sipèstisyon asks which is louder: the sound of our ache or the call to forgive?