In Black Imagination, a new anthology of sorts published by McSweeney's, Marin collects some of the spoken testimony she and three other artists—Amber Flame, Rachael Ferguson, and Imani Sims—gathered from a diverse set of black voices for an installation by the same name that ran at CORE Gallery in 2018. As part of that show, the artists recorded participants responding to three prompts: (1) What is your origin story? (2) How do you heal yourself? (3) Describe/imagine a world where you are loved, safe, and valued. In the book, Marin arranges the responses in reverse order, and she breaks up the testimonials with a series of her own poems called Interludes: Rituals. In all, Black Imagination reads like a survival guide with a sense of humor as deep as its sense of history, a literary oasis for black people fed up with the white gaze. The pieces by Quenton Baker, Robert Lashley, Reagan Jackson, and Marin are standouts, but the book also turned me on to great writers I'd never heard of before, such as Kenyatta JP Garcia, Kiana Davis, and Aricka Foreman. by Rich Smith