Description
Book SynopsisFrom the first poem to the last, Smartt's new chapbook collection advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires "reigned in" to protect a precarious and often incoherent code of Caribbean respectability. This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best. These poems sing, and dance and love passionately 'til morning cum. From the hazardous terrain of same-sex loving in Jamaica for some couples, to the manipulation of heterosexual marriage conventions in Barbados in the name of love, to the freedom of sexual abandon and the fulfilment of desire in Amsterdam, this small body of work is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Smartt's cartography renders new the old directive that we love each other, that we build and sustain community, that we protect and care for each other's needs, desires and dreams. Ultimately, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings On is about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.
Trade Review- poems like "Denial" push us to recognize ourselves in this collection, with its title poem offering us another contradictory migration story that reworks the standard heterosexual narrative. Sensual poems of desire, aging, need, place and historical location take us through to the writer's enduring love of nature - Carole Boyce Davies, Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University is author of Caribbean Spaces (UI Press, 2013) This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best. These poems sing, and dance and love passionately - this small body of work is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Smartt's cartography renders new the old directive that we love each other, that we build and sustain community, that we protect and care for each other's needs, desires and dreams... Donna Aza Weir-Soley, poet and Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, is co-editor of Caribbean Erotic (Peepal Tree Press, 2010)
Table of Contentswoman with golden apple (no ordinary fruit); muriel; drawn to you; reader, i married him; full moon at the hot pot; precious...; sing girl! sing; red shoes; telling time; headway; the trick they played was to be invisible...; eshu cuban fusion; is this a love poem?; on arrival at the royal college of music...; the yellow & black triangles; a sense of denial
