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Plus additional borrowing rights to the full library collection.

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Poetry & Fiction

Warsan Shire · Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth Thirty pages. The maternal body, migration, and the grief women inherit from each other across generations. One of the most concentrated collections in the library. Bring it to the salon and read it aloud.

Roxane Gay · Hunger A memoir of the body as a place you learn to defend. Gay writes about weight, appetite, and the aftermath of sexual violence with a precision that refuses both self-pity and resolution. The body here is not a problem to be solved; it is a record.

Akwaeke Emezi · Freshwater A novel told from inside a self that has been shattered by trauma, by spiritual multiplicity, by the violence of being forced into a single legible identity. Emezi writes the body as contested territory between the person inhabiting it and every force that wants to define it from outside.

Staceyann Chin · Crossfire: A Litany for Survival A queer Jamaican poet writing about her body as a place where violence and desire and refusal have all lived. The title's echo of Lorde's "A Litany for Survival" is not accidental. Chin is writing in direct conversation with this season's anchor text.

Yrsa Daley-Ward · Bone Short, fragmented, relentless. A poetry collection about what the body remembers long after the mind has tried to move on. Read slowly. Read more than once.

Safiya Sinclair · Cannibal A Jamaican woman's poetry collection about growing up as a woman in Rastafari. She recalls the body being watched, regulated, and made to mean things it did not choose. Sinclair reclaims appetite as a political act. Essential Caribbean reading for this season.

Memoir, Theory & Essays

Tressie McMillan Cottom · Thick Read the essay "Dying to Be Competent." In it, McMillan Cottom describes going to the hospital while miscarrying and being sent home. It is one of the most precise accounts in contemporary literature of what bodily autonomy actually costs Black women when they enter institutional care. The rest of the collection earns the same attention.

Audre Lorde · The Collected Poems and Sister Outsider Both texts are waiting for you in the library. The season centres on The Cancer Journals, but the full Collected Poems opens onto "Power," "Coal," and "A Litany for Survival" — each one a different angle on the same argument. Sister Outsider includes essays such as "Uses of the Erotic" and "The Master's Tools."

Akwaeke Emezi · Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir A series of letters to God from a trans Nigerian writer whose body was not recognised by medicine, their family, nor by the systems that claimed to care for it. Theology and bodily sovereignty are written as an act of survival.

Assata Shakur · Assata: An Autobiography Shakur's account of being shot by police, imprisoned, surviving, and escaping is one of the most politically charged bodily narratives in the RWL library. The Black radical body as a target of the State and as something the State ultimately failed to destroy.

bell hooks · Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood Less read than her theory, more devastating. hooks writes her Kentucky girlhood — the body's first encounters with gender, violence, and longing — with a plainness that her academic work rarely allows. Start here if you want to understand where her thinking came from.

Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.) · This Bridge Called My Back The foundational text of women of colour feminism. Its argument is that the body — specifically, the brown and Black and poor and queer body — is not just the subject of theory but its source. Everything this season builds on starts somewhere in these pages.

Annie Finch (ed.) · Choice Words: Writers on Abortion An anthology of writers on abortion; not arguments, but experiences. What it costs, what it means, what languages are available, and what falls short. The creative counterpart to the research we're also asking you to read.

Iqbal Shah & Ina Warriner (eds.) · Preventing Unsafe Abortion and Its Consequences The data behind the season's argument. For members who want to move between narrative and research, who need the numbers alongside the stories. Both matter. Both belong on this shelf.