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Duppy Conqueror
Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, finalist. "Dawes's verse has an expressive power and lyric resonance that can be attributed to a trans-Atlantic consciousness weaned on the spiritual sources of reggae."--New York Times Book Review "Raised in Jamaica, Dawes takes some of his cues, and this book's title, from reggae music. But his voice in these long and short poems and sequences selected from each of his many books, which began appearing in the mid-1990s, is crystal clear, accessible and serious, mixing a timeless myth-making energy with a strong contemporary conscience..." --National Public Radio "This first U.S. selection from the Jamaica-bred, Nebrask...
Nebraska
Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant. Purchase the audio edition.
City of Bones
As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.
Shook Foil
When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to keep his way pure? Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and ...
The Careless Seamstress
This dazzling debut announces a not-so-new voice: that of the spoken-word poet Tjawangwa Dema. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Dema’s collection, The Careless Seamstress, evokes the national and the subjective while reemphasizing that what is personal is always political. The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body—as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer—moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and...
Natural Mysticism
Dawes takes an in-depth look at reggae as an artistic form, exploring how reggae is both uniquely Jamaican and a music of world wide appeal. His writing communicates his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.
Tangling with the Epic
The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, the results reminding us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches.
Talk Yuh Talk
In the past 30 years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the US in the lyrics of reggae music, but that is only one aspect of a tradition characterized by continuing tension within a diverse heritage. Interviews in this collection reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from those poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae music and yard theater to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative. Dawes teaches English at the University of South Carolina. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Gomer's Song
Gomer, an Old Testament harlot, was the non-conformist wife of the prophet Hosea. In Dawes' contemporary reinterpretation of this Bible story, he presents a beautiful and sometimes erotic exploration of the cost of arriving at freedom with an uneasy grace. Dawes examines the insidious qualities of power, the confining nature of gender roles and the limits of protest. Through Gomer's journey, readers are asked to consider how each one of us is able to express our own defiance, as well as to tally the costs of our individuality.
I Saw Your Face
A poem and portraits of children illustrate the shared beauty and heritage of people of African descent living throughout the world.
