WOMANISH

A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life

By Kim McLarin

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When black women gather, unrehearsed refrains are often heard, surrounded by voices of encouragement or disbelief. In “Womanish,” McLarin incorporates these black female voices into her writing, itself blisteringly honest, funny and vulnerable. Other voices ring out, too: in “Becky and Me,” the voices of her girlfriends who find it nearly impossible to trust white women; in “Maurice’s Blues,” her sister’s voice as she grapples with her son’s prison sentence; and, in “The Upside to Loving a Sociopath,” the disembodied perspective of the D.S.M.-5 shedding light on a dysfunctional relationship. Essays like “Fire All the Time” and “Better Than the Alternative” (meditations on anger and aging, respectively) draw to a close just as McLarin’s prose is beginning its ascent, leaving readers wondering what heights it could have reached. Some may be taken aback by McLarin’s forceful frankness, as she contemplates suicide in “Eshu Finds Work,” or concocts the ideal retribution for one of the many wrongs she’s suffered in “A Case for the Selective, Targeted, Nonviolent Act of Revenge.” But black women’s truth, in chorus or solo, is best vocalized without restraint.

190 pp. Ig Publishing. Paper, $16.95.

NOTES FROM A BLACK WOMAN’S DIARY

Selected Works of Kathleen Collins

Edited by Nina Lorez Collins

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When Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, she left as her legacy “Losing Ground,” the first feature-length film directed by a black woman. Recently, thanks to the efforts of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, Kathleen and her work have been granted new and necessary examination. Following her posthumous 2016 story collection, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary” further celebrates this fertile mind through her fiction (both finished and not), plays and personal reflections. Collins sought the complexity of interiors, of both our homes and ourselves. Women take up space in her work with their love and their trauma. Though the oeuvre hails from the ’70s and ’80s, nothing feels dated. Readers will discover Collins is as she characterized herself: “I live way ahead of myself in some ways, seeing things long before it is their time to come into being.”