In her debut collection, Unearth [The Flowers], Thea Matthews offers to the world a botanical garden in which each flower shines with the vision of healing. Grappling with issues such as child abuse, sexual assault, and racism in the United States, Matthews channels a voice which sounds both distinctly individual, yet powerfully communal through every poem.

Catherine Coleman Flowers wrote Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret (The New Press) to call attention to how issues of sewage and wastewater are connected to rural poverty, infrastructural inequity, and systemic racism. Yet after reading the book, I thought a more accurate title might be a phrase Coleman uses on page sixty-three: My Education as an Activist.