End of summer is the most convenient time for me to indulge back into reading at a slower pace! Comics and poetry - Enjoy! 

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

New poetry book by Fred Moten - enthusiastically was waiting for this one. I also recommend checking out Moten’s work in sound - very interesting things being done by putting in conversation his poetic work, Black studies and Black sound!

Rina Ayuyang indulges her passion for old Hollywood and elaborate movie musicals while exploring her immigrant roots in a playful and mysterious drama creating something she never saw but always had hoped for—a classic tale about people who looked just like her. The Man in the McIntosh Suit is a gripping, romantic and psychological exploration of a fledgling community chasing the American dream in an unwelcoming society heightened by racial hostility and the bubbling undercurrent of the coming Great Depression.

Renata est une jeune fille mal dans sa peau. Depuis quelques temps, elle ressent d'étranges frissons qui se révèlent être une sorte de pouvoir : elle pressent les menaces. Malgré ce don, elle n'a pas pu prévenir le vol de son ordinateur. Au hasard d'une soirée, elle retrouve les voleurs mais les deux compères ne lui rendent pas de suite son précieux bien : commence alors un jeu vicieux de chantage et de mise en confiance, une aventure entre marginaux qui, chacun à leur manière, cherchent leur place.

On an assignment to survey an uninhabited Philippine island marked for commercial development, a jaded marine biologist and a guileless underwater photographer are surprised to find themselves thrust back together after losing touch. The straightforward mission gets complicated by their discovery of a strange giant squid that was thought to have gone extinct. As tensions rise over the fate of the creature, EJ and Dani must make their own choices about what's right, and what they owe to each other.

Her incredible story of a life lived and a world survived becomes a conduit for larger questions about the riddle of collective liberation. For a younger generation, she warns about the traps of ‘representation,’ the politics of 'self-care,' and the frequent dead-ends of non-profit organizing; for all of us, she is a strike against those who would erase these histories of struggle. Miss Major offers something that cannot be found elsewhere: an affirmation that our vision for freedom can and must be more expansive than those on offer by mainstream institutions.

The poems in Tender chronicle the experiences of Black people, especially of Black women, in their quest for self- determination and their desire to live full, complex, unencumbered lives. Employing her skills as a documentary filmmaker, Hamilton combines reclaimed historical accounts, memories and stories to engage subjects such as intergenerational trauma, racial violence, the silencing of girls and women, and the loss of children. Running throughout her work is a yearning for genuine equality and freedom, and an understanding that a better future begins with engaging honestly with our past.

Elliot's got a cavity. She knows it needs to be seen to, but right now she doesn't have the motivation to book an appointment with the dentist. She doesn't have the motivation to see her friends and family, do the laundry, cook and clean, or do anything much. Meanwhile, the cavity grows... and so does something inside it...

In her grandmother’s garden, a young Black girl learns about mindfulness and herbal medicine in this soothing intergenerational story about our connection to nature.

It’s Joy’s first summer in her grandmother’s South Carolina garden—a rite of passage. In the midst of okra, spinach, and strawberries, Grammy teaches Joy that plants are friends with many uses. Herbs, for example, can be turned into medicine.

There in Grammy’s abundant backyard, Joy learns to listen for the heartbeat of the earth and connect it to her own as she takes deep breaths and puts her intentions into the soil. By the story’s end, she learns to grow seeds in her own garden, honoring all that her grandmother taught her. With sensory-rich illustrations from award-winning illustrator Ashleigh Corrin, Joy Takes Root is a blissful reminder of all that might bloom.

Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan’s window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.

DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles's underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, “It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary.” I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, “is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself.”