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In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.

The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

Notably, this raucous collection also wrestles with Guaraní, a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. Guaraní both structures and punctures the book, surfacing in a sequence of jokes that double as poems, and introducing but leaving unresolved ambient questions about local histories of militarism, masculine bravado, and the outlook of the campos. Cutting across borders of every kind, Báez’s poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations.

Yaguareté White is a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions.
 

In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” 

So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?

Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death’s all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture—rather than strengthen—even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.

“Memory’s barriers are without barriers,” writes Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee in the opening of his touching and thoughtful memoir, Your Own Will Leave You. Bhattacharjee eloquently reflects on family, care, and memory as he chronicles his experiences with his elderly mother who suffers from dementia. Working from his journal, Bhattacharjee ruminates on the ways we understand dementia and memory as well as end-of-life issues. He is not only a loving son, but also an Indian with a universal sensibility who turns to ancient and contemporary thinkers that inform his perspective.

Bhattacharjee focuses on the last months of his mother’s life and her changing demeanor—her stubbornness, humor, and vulnerability. He traces her interactions with family members, neighbors, and caregivers, while also addressing burden-of-care issues. Recounting his moments of grief and guilt with candor, Bhattacharjee also re-evaluates how Western culture prejudices popular perceptions of mental illness.

Lyrical, penetrating, occasionally aphoristic, and full of insights, Your Own Will Leave You is a heartfelt, and at times heartbreaking, memoir and a warm elegy for the author’s late mother.