This week, Mount Holyoke News is highlighting several Black authors who have recent releases in honor of Black History Month. These emerging poets weave history, personal experiences, art and ancestry to craft thoughtful conversations about gender, sexuality and identity. Each of their poems, with unflinching words, opens a discussion about how Black history and experiences have shaped America.
“For eighteen years, my unibrow has saved me from being sold into a painful, terrifying death,” Xiran Jay Zhao writes in their debut novel, “Iron Widow.”
“Iron Widow” is not for the faint of heart.
A story about a thirst for vengeance and hunger for power, brimming with the pain caused by a deeply misogynistic society, the novel is for angry girls — the girls who have been beaten down and poked just enough to snap. For anyone who is aching to break out of the claustrophobic boxes that make up our world — “Iron Widow” is a novel of catharsis, or as the endorsement quote on the cover from E.K. Johnston states, “A primal scream of a book.”
