Voices Without Borders curates a collection of wide-ranging literary works that probe what it is to struggle against dominant (usually Western, white, capitalist, and patriarchal) narratives of progress and belonging.
Each of these books crosses geographies, time, family, and story, in a distinct way, challenging readers to ask questions alongside them: what are the building blocks of a life? What is struggle or refusal? What is a better world?
Individual Titles
Elementary Particles by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
This book holds the universality that comes from exploring the complex relationship between a child and her immigrant parents, and in turn, a mother and her children.
It’s for readers examining the building blocks of a life — the personal, family, and planetary histories, transformations, and losses we all experience.
Get Your CopyBaby Book by Amy Ching-Yan Lam
As Rinaldo Walcott said of this book, “These poems draw the reader in with the intimacy of the personal and the individual, only to break your heart with the collective world-making violences of colonial extraction, displacement, and capitalism’s accumulations.” These are poems and a poetics of ethics.
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Bottom Rail on Top by D.M. Bradford
In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life.
As author Katherine McKittrick says, “this is a beautiful expression of black livingness, wherein racial violence conditions a poetics of struggle, refusal and repetition.”
Get Your CopyMoldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick
Based on the author’s travels to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled, the book is for those seeking “a prayer for a better world, built not on burying old crimes, but on looking closely to see the truth of the past and to expose it so that it cannot poison the future.”
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MONUMENT by Manahil Bandukwala
Exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal’s story beyond the story of the Taj Mahal, this book is for readers asking beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry?
Get Your CopyHsin by Nanci Lee
By exploring Hsin, 4th Century Su Hui’s palindrome of longing, which frustrates, “the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West,” Lee explores her origins.
For those readers who appreciate Koan-like poems that are both ageless and contemporary.
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Accretion by Irfan Ali
This extraordinary debut, set in Toronto, unfurls against the backdrop of the ancient Persian love story of Layla and Majnun. For those looking for “a roadmap for finding love in everything—ourselves, family, soul mates, urban life, and faith.”
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