JTF (just the facts): Published in 2025 by New Poetics Publishing (here). Softcover (6.5 x 9 inches), housed in a cover, with 7 color photographs. Includes texts by the artist and Natalie Zelt. Design by Cristina Velásquez. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: At first glance, Give Yourself the Caribbean, again by the Jamaican-born, Bronx-based artist Samantha Box is a modest object: nine pages, offset-printed, folded, and sized to sit comfortably in your hand. It’s an object of quiet simplicity, yet its structure invites a layered reading. When folded, it offers fragments; when unfolded, it opens into a single field, encouraging movement across text and space. This choreography mirrors African diasporic themes at their core: the Caribbean not as a fixed geography but as a portable sensibility, something carried and reconfigured through memory and migration.

The zine was released as part of the Artist Volume Series, Issue 2 (Spring 2025) by New Poetics Publishing, an independent artist-run press based between Bogotá, New York, and Austin, and founded by artists Nechama Winston and Cristina Velásquez. The press collaborates with emerging artists to explore experimental approaches to photography in book form, amplifying underrepresented voices and diverse visual narratives. Through photography, the publisher aims to foster alternative ways of learning and thinking, and over the years, it has published work by various artists, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Camilo Godoy, Guanyu Xu, and Jenny Calivas. 

Box’s photographic practice has long interrogated identity and representation. Her earlier documentary work, notably “The Invisible Archive”, centered on unhoused queer youth in New York, while her recent studio-based series “Caribbean Dreams” turns inward, using still life and self-portraiture to explore colonial legacies embedded in aesthetics. As we unfold the zine, it reveals a layered narrative, offering a meditation on memory, diaspora, and the layered histories of the Caribbean. We might think of the zine as an atlas of diasporic imagination, a map that redraws itself as you turn the paper over and back again, and in this way, the constraints of the format keep the focus on the artist’s ideas and images. 

Box’s pictures move with quiet confidence: shadow that lingers, color that hums, and textures that brush softly against the eye. We feel the photographs before we decode them, as if they have been tuned to the back and forth cadence of a tide rather than the checklist of travel or the timeline of return. The word “again” in the title feels crucial. It points to repetition, to the need to revisit what was felt but not fully understood, to the cycles in which belonging is negotiated rather than declared. To “give yourself the Caribbean” is to grant permission, perhaps, to accept the parts of you that were dispersed, to gather them without apology, and to do so repeatedly, because identity does not quite settle, it keeps generating echoes that require attention. The pictures hold those echoes.

At times, Box seems to lean into fragments: a piece of fabric catching light, a wall whose paint carries the memory of sun, a palm’s fronds that carve the sky into geometry, and the fatigue in a gaze that acknowledges distance without dramatizing it. The work suggests that identity too lives at the edges, between places, between tongues, between present and remembered selves. To give yourself the Caribbean, again, is to allow the present to be shaped by echoes, to let the warmth and the shadows coexist, to hold the fragments without forcing them into one tidy story. There are no extraneous gestures in this tight package; every fold, every margin serves the argument. It trusts the reader’s intelligence, offering a proposition rather than a conclusion. Give Yourself the Caribbean, again is a lens for seeing the present through the residues of the past, and it’s a work that rewards close attention, a reminder that sometimes the most resonant journeys fit within the folds of a single sheet of paper.

Collector’s POV: Samantha Box does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. As a result, interested collectors should likely follow up directly with the artist via her website (linked in the sidebar.)