It’s not an exhaustive volume, as Young writes, but in its more than 1,000 pages, it captures the depth and urgency of Black poets’ contributions to the form and to the country. In describing the works he selected for this compendium of verse, the poet and incoming Smithsonian director Kevin Young elaborates on the late writer June Jordan’s celebration of the form: “In sonnets and anthems, odes and epics, Black poets in the Americas confronted violence and indifference, legal barriers to reading and writing, illegal suppression of voting rights, and outright threats.” The anthology includes writers such as Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, Gil Scott-Heron, Natasha Trethewey, Robin Coste Lewis, and my colleague Clint Smith. Read: There’s never been a story like Britney Spears’sĪfrican American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young The results are like Carey’s music: grandiosity made into art by humor, craft, and complexity.

Sharp analysis about race, poverty, fame, and control-plus insider takes on how popular culture has transformed since the late ’80s-harmonizes with the scene-setting detail work. The journalist Michaela Angela Davis has helped distill Carey’s knotty trajectory into a narrative propelled less by the reader’s voyeurism than by the authentic tensions of Carey’s life. “With precision, I would take one teeny-weeny bite along the scalloped edge.” Small moments like this, rendered in prose that’s amusingly fussy yet still lucid, elevate The Meaning of Mariah Carey from celebrity propaganda into impressive storytelling. “I’d hold the buttery, salty, crunchy goodness up to my nose, close my eyes, and breathe in one long, luxurious sniff,” she writes early in her memoir, sharing a childhood memory of her father’s strict rationing of snacks. Marcel Proust had his madeleine, Charles Foster Kane had his sled, and Mariah Carey has her Ritz Cracker.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener