A MICROCOSM could be defined as a community, a place or a situation encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of something much more significant. It can also be considered as the small-scale representation of the universe.

Untold Microcosms (Charco Press, £9.99) is an exciting attempt by 10 Latin American contemporary writers to examine artefacts from the Central and South America held in British Museum collections.

The anthology includes creative essays that look at the complex histories of some of these remarkable objects, spanning thousands of years of human history.

Argentinian writer Gabriela Cabezon Camara decided to look at the Wichi collection. She highlights the continuous displacement of Indigenous communities by capitalist enterprises in northern Argentina’s Chaco province and the lack of response from the Argentinian state.

Camara travelled to the Chaco and showed photos of the collection to local communities, triggering a series of encounters and dialogues with Wichi descendants that questioned colonialism and devastation wrought by capitalism.

Her approach, an almost ethnographic research, recorded the solidarity and generosity of the marginalised Wichi. Camara describes how they survived decades of oppression and violence, including the painful Anglican missionising that has affected spiritual life in the Argentinian Chaco until today.

She ends her powerful chronicle by asking: “Will the British Museum listen to these Anglican Wichis? […] These people have been robbed even of their own religion! And also of a huge part of Chaco’s primeval forest [by] the British company La Forestal… one of the greatest destroyers of this territory. They need scholarships. doctors, lawyers, subsidies to dig wells and extract drinking water… A great exhibition of their contemporary art.”

The anthology is full of powerful essays. Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza looks at the history of the potato plant through a sample collected by the English botanist John Gregory Hawkes outside Sucre, Bolivia.

Costa Rican Carlos Fonseca’s essay Heritage examines the life and travels of German explorer Robert Schomburgk and malevolent spirit kanaima — associated by the Wapishana, in highlands of Guyana, with outsiders.

There are also fascinating pieces by Mexican Yasnaya Elena A Gil, Colombians Juan Cardenas and Velia Vidal, Chilean Lina Meruane, Argentinian Dolores Reyes, and Peruvian Joseph Zarate.

Untold Microcosms — a collaborative project between the British Museum’s Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research (SDCELAR) and the Hay Festival (also published in Spanish) — is a significant literary work.

It looks at ways to decolonise museums and interrogates practices of museology and ethnography that allowed Indigenous communities in Central and South America to be disppossed of their sacred and spiritual objects, histories, lands and human rights. A must read.

Narcissus (Broken Sleep Books, £8.99) is Trinidadian poet Andre Bagoo’s sixth collection and one of his most ambitious. The book examines beautifully the Greek myth of Narcissus.

It explores queer sensibilities, the body and sexual desires, the relationship between art and life, and the many impacts of colonialism in the global South, especially in Trinidad.

In his sequence poem Ti Marie, Bagoo intertwines the history of a traditional Trinidadian plant, also called “Shame plant,” with queer desire and colonial histories: “In this savannah,/ trees have walked / away, leaving an expanse / of green loneliness in which / you crawl and creep, each of / your limbs like one of the boys / who almost loved me: bashful,/ sensitive, afraid, leaves opening / only by the night, thorny, purple-/flowered, strong stemmed: / Ti Marie, Mise Marie, morivivi,/ touch-me-not, shame plant,/ Mary Shut Your Door. Each / leaf, each name, the same/lover, spread in poor soil,/ where once cane was / grown and slaves knew.”

Bagoo, a 2021 OCM Bocas Prize winner for The Undiscovered Country, moves effortlessly between the lyrical and narrative registers to create a poetic universe of intense homoerotic beauty, arresting imagery and political force.

The collection opens with Epistemology of the Closet: “You make art of me,/ turn hate into the first poem / of a book you author / deep inside a closet / of sleep./ Count  sheep / dreamer,/ I authored you./ I looked and saw / a flower that looked and saw / itself /a flower that saw/itself —/ nightmare, petals / stone.”

Bagoo is one of the most exciting Trinidadian poets writing today. Highly recommended.