Mckendy Fils-Aimé · sipèstisyon · Yes Yes Books, June 2026 · 94 pages · $20
Sipèstisyon is Kreyòl for superstition, and the first decision this debut makes is to refuse the English word's condescension. In sipèstisyon, superstition is not the error a culture makes before it acquires science. It is a storage format — the way a household keeps hold of what happened to it when the official record declines to.
The inheritance problem
Fils-Aimé is a Haitian-American poet based in New England, a slam performer and organiser before he was a book, with fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, CantoMundo, The Watering Hole and Periplus. That performance history is audible: the poems are built for the ear first, with the kind of sonic momentum that survives being read aloud to a room that has not agreed to be quiet yet.
The book's recurring problem is the one every second-generation writer inherits: how to carry a rule whose reason has been lost in transit. Do not sweep at night. Do not answer the door twice. The rules survive the crossing; the explanations do not. Fils-Aimé's move is not to recover the explanations but to treat their absence as content — the missing reason is the shape the trauma left.
Watch me nourish & be nourishment.
The lougawou
The lougawou — the shapeshifting figure of Haitian folklore — moves through the collection as more than décor. In one of the strongest pieces, the lougawou is given the floor to discuss repetition, and the joke lands and then stops being a joke: a creature defined by transformation is exactly the right speaker for a book about how a family story mutates each time it is retold. The folkloric monster becomes a formal device for handling recurrence, which is a genuinely inventive piece of thinking.
Where it is strongest
In the poems where the language itself is contested. Fils-Aimé writes across Kreyòl and English without glossing, and refuses the footnote as a form of hospitality to the wrong reader. The result is that the reader who does not have the Kreyòl experiences, briefly and mildly, the condition the whole book is about: being handed something intact whose meaning you cannot fully open.
Where it strains
Occasionally the performance instinct wins an argument it should have lost — a closing line lands one beat too hard, a poem resolves an ambivalence it had been usefully holding. It is the characteristic risk of a debut assembled by someone very good at endings. It is also a small complaint about a book whose ambition is otherwise sustained across all ninety-four pages.
Verdict
A debut that argues, convincingly, that superstition is a rigorous technology for surviving history — and that the poem is the only container still shaped correctly to hold it. Read it beside the interview he gave Shō this summer; the two together are the best account of Haitian-American poetics published this year.