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In Zion Roses, her second collection, Monica Minott's poems grasp the reader's attention with a voice that is distinctively personal, both taut and musical--and tender and muscular when the occasion demands. Her language moves seamlessly and always appropriately between standard and Jamaican patwa, a reflection of a vision that encompasses a Black modernity still very much in touch with its aphoristic folk roots, where the ancestral meets Skype or a Jonkonnu band is stuck in a Kingston traffic jam. It is possible to see Minott's poems as being in a constant dialogue between four quadrants of engagement: with history, with landscape, with personal and family experience, and with the worlds of...
Monica Minott's poems draw on the enduring cult/culture of Jamaican womanhood in the sites that they command and in which they are empowered. This is not a context of gender separation. The sensuality and sexuality of her poems operate in zones where the male force is not to be excluded, but recognised as a presence, even when negative or oppositional, that helps to define female energy and power.
Featuring poems from: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Danielle Jennings, Ruel Johnson, Monica Minott, Debra Providence, Shivanee Ramlochan, Colin Robinson, and Sassy Ross. With a preface by Kwame Dawes. With a generous sample from each poet, this anthology is an opportunity to discover some of the best, new, previously unpublished voices from the Caribbean. This is a generation that has absorbed Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Martin Carter, and Lorna Goodison, while finding its own distinctive voice. Peekash Press is a collaboration between Akashic and UK-based publisher Peepal Tree Press, with a focus on publishing writers from and still living in the Caribbean. The debut title from Peekash, Pe...
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The latest release from Caribbean publisher Peekash Press celebrates some of the major new voices in Anglophone Caribbean literature. Difficult parents and lost children, unfaithful spouses and spectral lovers, mysterious ancestors and fierce bloodlines—the stories, poems, and memoirs in this new anthology tackle everything that’s most complicated and thrilling about family and history in the Caribbean. Collecting new writing by finalists for the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize, a groundbreaking award administered by the Bocas Lit Fest, Thicker Than Water shows us how a new generation of Caribbean authors address perennial questions of love, betrayal, and memory in small places where personal and collective histories are often troublingly intertwined. Featuring brand-new writing from: Lisa Allen-Agostini, Nicolette Bethel, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Vashti Bowlah, Richard Georges, Zahra Gordon, Barbara Jenkins, Lelawatee Manoo-Rahming, Ira Mathur, Diana McCaulay, Sharon Millar, Monica Minott, Philip Nanton, Xavier Navarro Aquino, Shivanee Ramlochan, Judy Raymond, Hazel Simmons-McDonald, Lynn Sweeting, and Peta-Gaye V. Williams.
Colin Robinson's long-awaited debut collection, You Have You Father Hard Head, represents a nuanced but unswerving engagement with desire and intimacy as he explores what it means to be a Caribbean son negotiating the complexities of relationships between men. In poems of generous vulnerability and intimacy, Robinson captures the voice of boys on whose spirits and "hard heads" their mothers live out the memory of their fathers.
Ramlochan's poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards.
In Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo, author of the Bocas prize shortlisted poetry collection, Burn, displays a continuing commitment to exploration and experiment. Andre Bagoo's poems explore the multiple resonances of the title, where pitch signifies both the stickiness of memory - the way the La Brea Pitch Lake is a place where "buried trees [are] born again" - and the idea of scattering: of places and impressions and the effort to hold them in one vision.
The beat and language of reggae arose from the Jamaican countryside and the sidewalks of Kingston, but they're basic for the poets represented in Wheel and Come Again. This remains true even though the poets' personal worlds range from the street to the university and from the tropics to Toronto, New York, and London. Wheel and Come Again features works by 28 poets of Caribbean origin; some remain in the islands, and others have migrated to North America and Britain. The book includes works by Canadian poets such as Rachel Manley, Afua Cooper, Lillian Allen, Olive Senior, and Clifton Joseph; UK poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean "Binta" Breeze; US writers Rohan B. Preston, Fred d'Aguiar, and others; and Island poets such as Anthony MacNeill and Lorna Goodison.