Books like Just Us: An American Conversation
A hybrid of poems, essays, and images documenting Rankine's attempts to hold everyday conversations about whiteness with friends, strangers, and herself.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Just Us: An American Conversation
Citizen: An American Lyric
A genre-bending work using poetry, essay, and image to document the accumulation of racial microaggressions and violence in everyday American life.
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin returns from Paris to America to bury his father, and in ten essays lays out what the country's racial lie has cost a son, a church, and a prose style.
The Fire Next Time
Two essays on race in America, a letter to Baldwin's nephew and a reflection on religion and the Nation of Islam, that remain as urgent and incandescent as when they were written.
Minor Feelings
Hong writes about Asian-American shame, Richard Pryor, friendship, and why the minor feelings of a model-minority life refuse to stay put.
Between the World and Me
A letter from a father to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to live in a Black body in America, written in the shadow of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Prince Jones.
Float
Twenty-two loose chapbooks in a clear slipcase, essays, lectures, librettos and poems, that can be read in any order and float against each other.
In the Dream House
A memoir of an abusive relationship with another woman, told in short chapters that each borrow a different genre or trope, from haunted house to choose-your-own-adventure.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Seventy sonnets written in the first months of the Trump presidency, each an address to an imagined assassin, Black life, and the ghosts of the form.
Wade in the Water
The former US Poet Laureate writes through Civil War letters, motherhood, and ecological grief, listening for the voices buried in the national record.
DMZ Colony
National Book Award-winning hybrid of poetry, prose, photos, and drawings that confronts the ongoing American war in Korea through translation and witness.
Lost Children Archive
A family drives from New York to the Arizona borderlands, the mother to document children caught at the border, the father to record the echoes of the Apache, as their marriage comes apart.
Apeirogon
A Palestinian father and an Israeli father, both of whom have lost daughters to the conflict, drive the territory of their shared loss across a thousand numbered fragments.