In her ambitious fictional debut, award‑winning poet Canisia Lubrin attempts something both daring and complex: a sustained creative reimagining of the infamous 1685 Code Noir, the legal framework that governed slavery across the French colonial empire. She frames the book as 59 interconnected stories that mirror the code’s 59 articles, stitching together fragments of Black experience across time, place and genre. The conceit is striking, and many individual pieces blaze with vivid imagery and sharp social insight, but the collection sometimes buckles under the demands of its experimental architecture.

Lubrin’s poetic instincts are evident on every page. Her prose frequently attains a haunting musicality — most notably in pieces such as “The Origin of the Lullaby” and “Earth in the Time of Billie Holiday” — and the text is densely layered with metaphor and allusion. Those rewards accumulate for readers willing to linger; at times, however, the language’s opacity can test patience and obscure emotional connection.

The 59‑story framework enables a wide range of modes. The book moves through:

grounded historical fiction rooted in particular times and places;

surreal, dreamlike sequences that deliberately blur fact and fantasy;

contemporary slice‑of‑life vignettes;

dystopian and speculative imaginings;

and meta‑textual experiments that interrogate form itself.

This formal variety highlights Lubrin’s range and fearlessness, but it also produces an uneven reading experience. Transitions between styles and eras can be abrupt; the tonal shifts — while often exhilarating — sometimes undermine narrative momentum. Some of the more conceptually daring pieces feel as if clarity has been sacrificed for ambition.

A central achievement of the collection is its exploration of intergenerational trauma. Several stories — “The Keeper of the Dates” and “Cedar Grove Rose,” among them — powerfully trace how memories of oppression reverberate into the present, shaping relationships, identities and everyday life. Lubrin shows, with nuance, how the past refuses to stay buried and how surviving legacies of violence manifest in both overt and subterranean ways.

Identity and belonging recur as urgent concerns. Characters wrestle with heritage, language and displacement. “No ID, or We Could Be Brothers” stands out for its delicate rendering of solidarity and alienation within immigrant communities. Throughout, Lubrin probes the mechanisms of power, alternating between explicit reckonings with historical injustice and subtler examinations of contemporary control and resistance.

Although getting lost in its own complexity at times, “Code Noir” is an imaginative and formally adventurous piece.