Poems for Alma Thomas

Books Newsletter

An excerpt from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book on the late painter, plus reviews of new titles by Sophie Lewis and Dana Mashoian Walrath.

Reading through Undrowned a few years ago, I marveled at poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s ability to see a confluence of marine mammal life and Black feminist thought that others couldn’t. (Plus, as a child of the Finding Nemo era, I suspected she’d cracked open a new way to frame our collective fascination with the sea.) So when I heard that she was writing a book about the late artist Alma Thomas, I couldn’t wait to see how she applied her signature tenderness, sorely lacking in much of mainstream criticism, to the beloved paintings. When Gumbs looks at Thomas’s canvases, she sees braids, heirloom corn, and the root system of history. In an exquisite excerpt from Primary: After and With Alma Thomas, Gumbs draws on the writing of historian Richard J. Powell to reframe Thomas’s “color fields as cornrows,” blending poetry and biography to theorize what grounds much of Black diasporic visual culture: the art of sistering.

In another nod to marine life, author Sophie Lewis’s Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe tackles the politics and erotic power of femme aesthetics, still rejected and ridiculed even in some contemporary feminist circles. Critic Eileen G’Sell, ever preoccupied with questions of glamour, authenticity, and adornment, reviews the book below.

Read on for Noah Fischer’s candid reflection on The Book of Genocides by Dana Mashoian Walrath, podcasts and articles that caught our eye this week, and the other books keeping our editorial team company on our subway commutes.

—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor

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From Our Critics

In the News

• The Brooklyn Public Library officially launched its first-ever lending program for craft supplies on Wednesday, September 9.
• Disgraced financier and Museum of Modern Art board member Leon Black plans to convert an iconic Manhattan property into a foundation to display his estimated $5 billion art collection, a new book reveals.
• The Rumpus’s co-owners Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman are hosting a free, virtual conversation with the one and only Emily Wilson on Friday at 7pm EDT. (The classicist’s translation of the Odyssey apparently informed Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, which, as her viral review last month indicates, failed to impress her.)
• Wake up, babe … Printed Matter’s annual New York Art Book Fair returns to MoMA PS1 in Queens this Thursday through Sunday, with dozens of luminary small presses and printmakers.

Required Reading

• Never have I been more grateful to have my sense of self shattered than I was listening to scholar Hadley Suter on The History of Literature podcast. Discussing her new book on the French novelist Stendhal, she delves into the origins of “authenticity” in fiction and characters’ performance of their own selfhood. Before it became the norm in broader culture, she explains, Stendhal was charting new territory.
• Critic and journalist Shamira Ibrahim just released Liner Notes: A Critic’s Notebook, a free digital zine she edited. It’s got essays by music critics of color who offer candid snapshots of what it’s like to work in the field today, from deep economic divides to the extractive demands of digital media.
• The staff at Defector shared some beautiful reflections on the impact of author Annie Dillard, who passed away last week at age 81. “One of the things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time” is a piece of advice for the ages.
• Writing for the Nation, novelist and storyteller Laila Lalami brings two works of art by Palestinian women into conversation: Soraya Antonius’s 1986 novel The Lord and Annemarie Jacir’s 2025 film Palestine ’36. (The latter was one of our favorites at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia last month.)
• Anyone who has attended book talks around New York has likely brushed shoulders with Lucy Yu, who founded Yu & Me Books in Chinatown five years ago. Over two years after a fire threatened to shutter it for good, the community-minded bookstore is now the subject of a lovely documentary. Hell Gate’s Julianne Escobedo Shepherd writes about the film on the community-minded bookstore’s impact on the local literary, activist, and creative scene.

What We’re Reading

• I’ve just joined about half of the Hyper office in finishing Yesteryear — certainly a page-turner, but not as satisfying once it’s over. And I’m almost through Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. I already know it’ll be a book that’ll sit on my desk for a long time to come — to the fiction writers out there, I absolutely vouch for it. —Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
• I Liked Rex is a jewel box of short stories in their purest form; Diane Williams, who read some of them to a rapt audience at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location earlier this month, does more in a single page than some do in hundreds. I’m savoring each glittering one of them. (Also, nobody writes an introduction like Merve Emre.) —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor

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