The U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera contributes a short poem that salutes the unnamed and undocumented workers who still try. Very often what is left behind isn’t in the past at all. In her short story “Dosas,” Edwidge Danticat conjures a home health aide whose ex-boyfriend returns with a request for money because his new wife has been kidnapped back home in Haiti.

The problems of America are indeed not just based in the United States, but they follow populations here and take root in this landscape. The poet Lawrence Joseph writes of the tectonic tension global forces brought to bear on Detroit, the city demolished by fleeing manufacturing industries that have shipped jobs overseas. Timothy Egan remembers the days when you could find such work to sustain you in Seattle—that is no longer the case. The novelist Richard Russo muses on what a blow it is to a person’s dignity when their work is taken away, how that destroys a part of their soul. So what do you do? Sarah Smarsh’s brother—like many thousands of Americans—sells his blood plasma to the growing global industry of plasma sales in Kansas. In RS Deeren’s short story, two men in Michigan mow lawns of recently repossessed homes: they do not lack for work. Jess Ruliffson describes veterans returning to the lower Plains from Iraq to precarious employment.

This does not of course stop new families from coming to the United States, there is just a much steeper ladder for coming out of poverty—and also a crisis of identity of what America is, and who counts as citizens. In her short story, Ru Freeman brings to life housekeepers and nannies who live in the orbit of families but get very little of the benefits. In her essay, Patricia Engel describes how an influx of labor in these industries from Cuba, the Caribbean, Mexico, and elsewhere call Miami home now, as whites in the same city redefine their notion of home in terms of racial purity and exclusion. Rebecca Solnit’s devastating account of a shooting in San Francisco describes how the incident came as a direct result of the encroaching gentrification of the victim’s neighborhood. The people who called the police on the day of the victim’s death would have known him had they lived in the area for years, as so many residents around them did.

Too often the police are in an adversarial relationship with people they are meant to protect. In her powerful poem, “American Arithmetic,” Natalie Diaz meditates on the fact that while Native Americans make up less than one percent of the population, they are killed at an alarming rate. “When we are dying,” she writes, “Who should we call?” In Kiese Laymon’s potent essay, he recalls a friend who was arrested in his college town for allegedly doing what so many of its students do—selling drugs. Only, in his friend’s case, since he wasn’t a student, the law was far swifter and more severe. The deterioration of this relationship between police and Americans of color has created a sense that there are two Americas, one black, one blue, and the dream that America tells itself is possible feels not like a dream but like a lie—something the poet Danez Smith circles in his beautiful poem. It’s been this way for a long time, Kevin Young’s poem on Howlin’ Wolf reminds, something that demands a song of protest.

How are white Americans to situate themselves before this blunt fact? How do they acknowledge it while also respecting that it is far easier for them to protest than their brothers and sisters who pay far more dearly for their voices? In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Leander,” an older white woman visits an African American church that hosts a Black Lives Matters–type protest and finds herself feeling like an intruder; all of her instincts lead to self-consciousness. In her essay, Eula Biss changes the concept from white guilt to white debt, a far more useful idea in the face of the economic benefits of being white. Brad Watson learned these lessons early growing up in Mississippi, when his mother hired a woman of color to be their housekeeper for a daily wage that was less than he made in a few hours mowing lawns.

Education has so long been held aloft as the way that America can correct the systemic imbalances of its history and culture. Several pieces here explore the loopholes in that equation. Kirstin Valdez Quade remembers working as a counselor at an elite prep school’s summer program, where a Hispanic student from a lower-income background flunked out due to the lack of support the program gave her—even as that program coveted the girl’s diversity. Quade makes a powerful argument for why schools that run such programs made to enhance diversity in their student body need to do more for their enrollees upon their arrival. No such programs existed when Dagoberto Gilb was growing up in Los Angles and Texas—he had to make the possibility for himself, and in his memoir describes the agonies and leave-takings such a discovery entailed. In Nami Mun’s short story, two parents who have sacrificed everything for their child to have opportunities they never did pay the ultimate price when their debt comes crashing down on them.

One of the powerful sensations that arises from these pieces concerns the ethics of our times. How can some of us live when we know others are not experiencing the same comfort? In Héctor Tobar’s memoir, he recalls reporting on a gang shooting casualty, a young boy his son’s age, in a neighborhood adjacent to his own in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, over in Idaho, Anthony Doerr returns home to his house tired from a day with his children and discovers a man parked in his driveway, possibly asleep in his car. Who is this man, he wonders, and what has led him to a remote cul-de-sac near Boise? Is he simply tired or out of steam in an existential sense? Where the stress falls and where it does not can feel—in a culture that has so eagerly ripped out certain social nets—almost cruelly random. In Joy Williams’s story, a man prepares to dismantle the estate of a wealthy politician in Maine, his house and liquor stocks suddenly, without the late man’s presence, highlighting the absurdity of accumulation for its own sake.

There is a lurking feeling of estrangement in America.