Milk White Steed

Dislocation and unfulfilled dreams haunt this ragged yet affecting debut collection from New Yorker cartoonist Kennedy. With a blocky style that alternates between immersive chaos and wider scenes of emptiness, Kennedy’s storytelling is loose, fanciful, and at times hard to grasp. The 10 stories span decades, oceans, and even solar systems but are linked by the longing for home. Kennedy’s semi-dazed wanderers and dreamers traverse the cold damp “bleak” of England’s Midlands, where Caribbean emigrants of the Windrush generation face nativist hate and loneliness; 1920s Louisiana, where a ghostly folk tale has the cutting rawness of an undiscovered Delta blues masterpiece; and a faraway planet where even interstellar exploration cannot escape the stain of colonialism. There are fitful references to resistance, as in the callout to dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Inglan is a Bitch” and a woman’s declaration of postcolonial optimism (“Damn right, the Irish, the Africas, next the Indies... all the rapers and the pillagers can get stuffed!”). But despite all the talking animals, spirits, and shape-shifting, Kennedy’s vision maintains a gritty, true-to-life understanding of the perpetually in-between state of diasporic peoples. This dreamy and embittered work lays bare the challenges of living in an inequitable world. (Feb.)