HIDE

A moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to her country's unique Islamic heritage--"a must-read in our warring world today" (NPR)

"A harrowing survivor's tale, an important history lesson, and a desperate warning from someone who has seen the tragic effects of ethnic violence."--Time

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - FINALIST FOR THE PEN/GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION

In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India's fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, will later be accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, will rise to become India's prime minister, sending the "world's largest democracy" hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism.

The Lucky Ones traces the past of a multigenerational Muslim family to India's brave but bloody origins, a segregated city's ancient past, and the lingering hurt causing bloodshed on the streets. Symphonic interludes offer glimpses into the precious, ordinary lives of Muslims, all locked together in a crumbling apartment building in the city's old quarters, with their ability to forgive and find laughter, to offer grace even as the world outside, and their place in it, falls apart.

The Lucky Ones entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, examines forgotten myths, prods a family's secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. It is a warning thrown to the world by a young survivor, to democracies that fail to protect their vulnerable, and to homes that won't listen to their daughters. It is an ode to the rebellion of a young woman who insists she will belong to her land, family, and faith on her own terms.

Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely searches for hope in spaces of fragmentation

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, 2024 - Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 2024

"There are places," Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, "where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed."

In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality's language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.

Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's resolute, energized debut shifts language's fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.

Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.

In radiant poems--set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics--Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother's death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss.

A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body's internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.

12 Million Black Voices, first published in 1941, combines Wright's prose with startling photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam from the Security Farm Administration files compiled during the Great Depression. The photographs include works by such giants as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein. From crowded, rundown farm shacks to Harlem storefront churches, the photos depict the lives of black people in 1930s America--their misery and weariness under rural poverty, their spiritual strength, and their lives in northern ghettos. Wright's accompanying text eloquently narrates the story of these 90 pictures and delivers a powerful commentary on the origins and history of black oppression in this country. Also included are new prefaces by Douglas Brinkley, Noel Ignatiev, and Michael Eric Dyson. "Among all the works of Wright, 12 Million Black Voices stands out as a work of poetry, ... passion, ... and of love."--David Bradley "A more eloquent statement of its kind could hardly have been devised."--The New York Times Book Review