New and Noteworthy: Black Feminism, ‘That Tooth Nibbling at Your Soul,’ and Jamila Woods’ New Album

Poured Out

Singer-songwriter Jamila Woods draws on themes of spirituality and racial justice to create music at once urgent and transcendent. In her new album, Water Made Us, she sings, “Here comes the flood, I’ll save a place for you. / And when it’s all said and done / I hope you send a dove.” Jagjaguwar

Showing the Way

Black Women Taught Us is an “intimate history” of Black feminism, honoring figures such as Harriet Jacobs, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Audre Lorde. The book is scholar Jenn M. Jackson’s love letter to the movement builders who “taught us how to love ourselves whole.” Penguin Random House

Beauty and Anguish

In Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, poet and translator Christian Wiman offers a kaleidoscopic blend of literary genres, amounting to a striking articulation of the call of God—“that tooth nibbling at your soul”—amid existential angst. Farrar, Straus and Giroux