Good Women

In Hill’s fierce debut collection, Black women hunger to escape from their lives. “Seeking Arrangements,” one of several brief and piercing entries, follows 20-something Krystall on a bus trip from Nashville, Tenn., to Florida with an older white man she met online. As their voyage progresses, Krystall imagines running away with the bus driver, a Black woman who endures racist slurs from another passenger. The excellent “Skin Hunger” revolves around Shauna’s unhappy marriage and social life with her and her white husband’s Presbyterian friends in Knoxville, who pressure her along with her in-laws to have a baby, prompting her to relish a week away to visit her sister in the Great Smoky Mountains. In the somber “Keeping Noisettes,” chaste middle-aged Lucille takes in a younger woman whose free spirit and beauty give her glimmers of how her life might have gone. Though Hill can be prone to repeating motifs, the collection not only coheres but progresses with its closer, “How to Cut and Quarter,” in which the grown daughter of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor faces her adulterous father’s duplicitousness after his funeral in Chattanooga (“Maybe he didn’t want to be known by me”) and reckons with memories of the church community she’d left for Atlanta. This heralds a bright new talent. (Sept.)