We're Alone: Essays

"Edwidge Danticat is agile when juggling duality. It’s a core feature of We’re Alone, her essay collection that strives for a “kind of aloneness/togetherness.” The title is a nod to both the isolation that life can make us feel and intimacy between reader and writer. And that duality governs so much of what Danticat confronts – displacement, gun violence, hurricanes, political tumult. Things that can end you, or make you anew. “Part of my job as a writer is to wrestle with mortality, both my own and that of others,” she writes. And yet Danticat’s observations feel more like a guide to living – a testament to what writers can offer in difficult times."