Edwidge Danticat is agile when juggling duality. It's a core feature of <i>We're Alone</i>, her essay collection that strives for a "kind of aloneness/togetherness." The title is a nod to both the isolation that life can make us feel and intimacy between reader and writer. And that duality governs so much of what Danticat confronts - displacement, gun violence, hurricanes, political tumult. Things that can end you, or make you anew. "Part of my job as a writer is to wrestle with mortality, both my own and that of others," she writes. And yet <b>Danticat's observations feel more like a guide to living - a testament to what writers can offer in difficult times.</b>
- Tinbete Ermyas, NPR (Best Books of 2024)
The essays<b> </b>-<b> lucid, unaffected, peppered with Creole proverbs</b> -<b> move from the personal to the political, and from local to global contexts, with convincing ease</b>. Danticat offers<b> an invaluable primer</b> to the Haitian American experience in all its inherited trauma. Arguably she does for the Haitian diaspora what Junot Díaz has done for Dominican Americans
TLS