Keisha Scarville’s *lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound*, published by MACK in 2023, begins with a personal question: how are belonging and identity formed across generations and across geography? Scarville traces routes of movement between the Caribbean and America to investigate her own lineage, while attending to the narratives that remain latent in memory and its thresholds. The book treats diaspora not as a fixed condition, but as an ongoing process of becoming.

Its form is deliberately expansive. Scarville’s striking black-and-white photographs are interwoven with archival imagery, passages from books, collages, personal texts, and film stills, producing a visual essay that moves between individual experience and the wider histories of the Black diaspora. Rather than presenting genealogy as a neat, linear chain, the book uses the artist’s-book form to interrupt conventional histories and imagine new relations between fragments, images, and inherited stories.

That structure is central to the book’s significance. The archive here is not simply a repository of evidence; it becomes an active field in which memory can be rearranged and identity reconsidered. The resulting sequence holds personal and historical narratives in productive tension, asking what it means to construct a lineage when the available record is dispersed, interrupted, or shaped by migration. An accompanying text by poet and author Harmony Holiday extends this layered conversation between image, language, and inheritance.

For serious collectors, the book deserves attention as Scarville’s first publication and as a carefully integrated collaboration between photographic practice, archival material, and literary reflection. Its 168-page paperback format gives the work room to unfold as a sustained essay rather than a portfolio of isolated images. The book’s distinctive achievement lies in making the instability of diasporic memory—not a limitation to overcome, but a method for creating new genealogies—felt through sequence, juxtaposition, and return.