Yu’s prose flows as much for our reading pleasure as it does for easing us into the long histories and present realities of violence against Asian women. But it also delivers a valuable framework for unpacking traumas, unlearning harmful ideologies, and embracing one’s vulnerabilities after years of detachment and self-preservation. Fetishized brims over with disarming humor and honesty.

United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel is a work of metamorphoses and becomings, masterfully achieved through the image-inspiring words of iconic Latinx poet and radical thinker Giannina Braschi and the artwork of Joakim Lindengren, whose illustrations give them a bizarre and beautiful twist.

Namor’s vision could be described as aqua-pessimism—a fluid, insurgent worldview that interrogates whether the surface world, as it currently exists, is even worthy of inclusion in the inevitable, irrepressible unfolding of Black and Brown futures.