For the Unnamed (Carcanet Press) by British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar presents the reimagined history of a famous Black jockey who won the race of a lifetime, guiding José Sepulveda’s horse Black Swan in a victory against Pio Pico’s horse Sarco on March 20, 1852. While the race itself helped to solidify early Los Angeles adulation for horseracing, little was ever publicised about the trailblazing jockey himself. In these questioning, multilayered poems, D’Aguiar addresses this gap in the archives by conjuring perspectives of a Black freed man’s lot in the mid-nineteenth century.