Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thick with Trouble | 2024 | Amber McBride | Buy |
Thick with Trouble arrived in 2024 as Amber McBride’s first collection presented explicitly as poetry rather than verse fiction. The book draws on her family’s history and on the larger history of Black Americans, layering personal memory with a sense of inherited experience that runs deeper than individual biography.
The collection was also published as part of the Penguin Poets series, situating McBride within a long tradition of American poetry publishing while signaling her importance as a poet in her own right, separate from her identity as a YA author. The two modes, verse novel and lyric collection, inform each other in her work, and Thick with Trouble repays attention from readers who have followed her fiction and from poetry readers encountering her for the first time.