The Black Shield, by Wilbert L. Cooper (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this multilayered work, a journalist examines a Black police organization, known as the Black Shield, that emerged in Cleveland in the nineteen-forties, alongside his own parents’ membership in it. Cooper assesses the notion that Black communities are “safer and served better” when the police who surveil and discipline them are Black, too. In theory, he writes, the Black Shield offers opportunity for young people living in the economically distressed community where it is based, but he concludes that the group is less focussed on justice than on “getting the same lack of accountability that White officers enjoyed.” His ultimate indictment is nuanced, and has shades of appreciation—for his parents, and for the badge that “shielded my family.”
Endless Endings, by Ricard Solé, translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio (Princeton). A single cell serves as the starting point for this lyrical exploration of death. From a consideration of apoptosis—the orderly elimination of damaged or unnecessary cells—Solé moves on to failing machines, eroded memories, vanished languages, brittle digital archives, and more. His overarching idea is that organisms, minds, technologies, and cultures survive by sustaining flows of matter, energy, or information; their final deaths occur not when a single constituent part disappears but when the processes holding the larger system together falter. Solé reveals a paradox: death is not merely life’s opposite but also one of its organizing forces, a constant cycle of removal and renewal through which complex systems are preserved.
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Solstice, by Carol Gilligan (Random House). This tender novel of intimacy and its risks begins in Boston in 1969, as Eve, a dancer, commences an affair with a colleague—an indiscretion that spurs her husband, a journalist named Gabe, to cheat, too. Under the influence of their era’s changing sexual mores, they soon reconcile. But then, in the eighties, Gabe returns from a reporting trip to the Middle East having taken up with a much younger woman. By this time, the couple share decades of history, along with three children. Gilligan’s portrait of their relationship is a study of how time binds people together. “There was a membrane now stretching between them,” she writes, “encompassing the two of them and enclosing them, fragile and yet impermeable.”
I Was Bonnie & Clyde, by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon). The wily, beguiling poems in this collection probe selves and stories as sites of rupture and refraction. The book’s eponymous poem, for instance, begins, “You were Friday & Death. / I was Jekyll & Hyde. / You were my mother. / I Alive.” Throughout, Kasischke’s images ricochet off one another—suggesting narrative while resisting its confines, evoking stereotypical ideas and expectations of Western womanhood only to upend them. In a voice at once biting and contemplative, eerie and funny, Kasischke crafts poems in which nothing is ever stable or resolved. There is only “The confusion of the past / as fireproof as ash. // The follies of the future / as bulletproof as water.”
