Search results for ""Author Kwame Dawes""

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 where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song?But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?"Throughout the collection, Dawes captures the many dimensions of reggae from the psalmic to the prophetic that are yet to be explored by other writers and musicians. Reggae remains unparalleled in its ability to absorb other influences and remain true to itself and to capture beauty, pain, and pleasure in a one-drop riddim. Its syncopation suggests a break, a gap - somewhere to fall with the faith that you will be caught - and this is what gives reggae its redemptive value. To really enjoy the music, you must believe. The same could be said of Shook Foil."Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Poor sower of seeds with a gift for dreaming, Jacko Jacobus knows that his destiny is to found a people to shake the nations. But when he has to flee Jamaica to escape his brother's wrath, he finds himself pushing crack for his Uncle Al in South Carolina. In writing his dub version of the myth of Jacob and Esau, Kwame Dawes builds on a gripping narrative of prophecy, love, deceit and murder to address contemporary Caribbean realities; and in portraying the conflict between Jacko's trickster, anancy inventiveness and the narrow righteousness of his brother Eric's path, he explores the universal tensions between Jacko's sense of duty as the chosen instrument of God, and his desire to make his own way, whatever the consequences.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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During 2015 and 2016, two poets from opposite sides of the world, Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, exchanged poems in two cycles, Echoes and Refrains and Illuminations, that were in constant dialogue even as they remained defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives.Kwame Dawes’ base was the flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a landscape in which he, a black man, originally from Ghana and Jamaica, felt at once alien and deeply committed to the challenges of finding “home”. John Kinsella’s base was in the violently beautiful landscape of Western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and the challenge of ecological threat and political ineptitude. In the first cycle, Echoes and Refrains, the poets sought and found a language for this conversation of various modes and moods. They were linked by the political and social upheavals in their respective spheres – Dawes contemplating the waves of violence consuming the US and the world, and Kinsella confronting the injustice of the theft of indigenous land and the terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants. These poems chart an unpredictable journey towards friendship. They reflect commonalities – love of family, cricket, art, politics, music, and travel – and in poem after poem one senses how each is hungry to hear from the other and to then treat the revelations that arrive as triggers for his own lyric introspection – risky, complex, formally considered and beautiful. They stretch one another, and provoke to a poetic honesty that comes with authority and assurance. In the second cycle of poems, Illuminations, locations shift but the concerns remain and are considered in different lights. Speak from Here to There reminds us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite the peculiar creative frenzy that enriches us.

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Using the power of language to explore and discover patterns of meaning, this stunning and ambitious collection brings the lyric poem face to face with the external world, with its politics, social upheavals, and ideological complexity. Whether it is a poem about a near victim of the Lockerbie bombing reflecting on the nature of grace, a president considering the function of art, or a Rastafarian defending his faith, the selections all seek illumination and understanding in the world. Using images from Garcia Marquez's novels, accounts of slave rebellions, passages from the Book of Ezekiel, the art of modernist painters and wall-to-wall news coverage, Dawes creates a striking series of poems that are about finding pathways of meaning, and the quest for love and faith.Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 but grew up in Jamaica. He is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. A poet, actor, editor, critic, musician and professor of English, he is the author of 17 books. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2001. His poetry collections include Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Shook Foil: A Collection of Reggae Poetry (Peepal Tree, 1997) and Map-Maker (Smith/Doorstop, 2000), winner of the The Poetry Business Prize. His New and Selected Poems, 1994-2002 was published by Peepal Tree in 2002. He recently edited the acclaimed anthology Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (Peepal Tree, 2010).

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This is an anthology to delight both lovers of reggae and lovers of poetry which sings light as a feather, heavy as lead over the bedrock of drum and bass. If in the past Caribbean poetry seemed split between the English literary tradition and the oral performance of dub poetry, Wheel and Come Again brings together work which combines reggae's emotional immediacy, prophetic vision, fire and brimstone protest and sensuous eroticism with all the traditional resources of poetry: verbal inventiveness, richness of metaphor and craft in the handling of patterns of rhythm, sound and poetic structure.Its range is as wide as reggae itself. There are poems celebrating, and sometimes mourning, the lives and art of such creative geniuses as Don Drummond, Count Ossie, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Bob Marley, Big Youth, Bunny Wailer, Winston Rodney, Patra and Garnett Silk. There are poems of apocalyptic vision, fantasy, humour and storytelling; poems about history, culture, politics, religion, art, human relationships and love; poems which employ standard Caribbean English, poems written in Jamaican nation language and many poems which move easily between the two.From its birth in the ghettos of Kingston, reggae has become an international musical language, and whilst Jamaicans are inevitably well represented in this anthology, Wheel and Come Again reflects reggae's universal appeal with contributors from the USA, Canada, Britain, Guyana and St. Lucia. What all have found in reggae is an art with a rich aesthetic which, like the poetry they aspire to write, speaks to the body, mind and spirit, which compels a state of heightened expectancy with its combination of pattern and surprise: 'Counting out the unspoken pulse/ then wheel and come again'."Wheel and Come Again is no academic treatise - it is an attempt to hold a dancehall session in poetry, to take readers to the heart of reggae and carry them into the compelling seduction of the drum and bass' (26). This bold assertion, made in the introduction of Dawes's latest work, Wheel and Come Again, could have also added the word 'celebration'. And there is a lot to celebrate in this anthology"Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Sturge Town is a stunning collection of poems that connects with the earliest days of Kwame Dawes’ work as a poet, from the roots of childhood in Ghana to the reflections of a man turned sixty who is witnessing his children occupying the space he once considered his own. It ranges from poems that make something special of the everyday, to poems of the most astonishing imaginative leaps. There are poems that speak most movingly of moments of acute self-reflection, family crises and losses through death, and there are the inventive poems of the dramatist drawn to create the stories of a rich variety of characters, many springing from the observation of paintings. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualised spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Organised in five sections, Sturge Town is a collection of finely shaped individual poems with the architecture of a densely interconnected whole, with the soaring grandeur and intimacy of a cathedral – both above and below ground. As the site of the ruined ancestral home of the Dawes, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is both an actual place, a place of myth and a metaphor of the journeying that has taken Kwame Dawes from Ghana, through Jamaica, through South Carolina and now to Nebraska. It parallels a journeying through time, both personal, family and ancestral in which a keen sense of mortality makes life all the more precious.

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After completing four collections of dialogue in poems, Kwame Dawes in Nebraska (via Ghana and Jamaica) and John Kinsella in Western Australia, have produced a monumental fifth volume in four movements: unHistory. unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, acutely sensitive to the bracing global turmoil of the last five years. It is an exploration of history’s undertones, its personal, familial and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination. It is at the same time an elegant enactment of friendship and memory. As in previous volumes, the marvel is poetry that has all the fluidity of spontaneous response, and the shapeliness and finesse of the most deeply considered work written by two prolific and influential writers at the height of their powers as poets. “What Dawes and Kinsella provide each other with is less a means of achieving perfect insight than of casting light on the other’s blindnesses." Will Harris on Speak from Here to There “Kwame Dawes is one of the most important writers of his generation who has built a mighty and lasting body of work.” Elizabeth Alexander “John Kinsella is one of Australia’s most vivid, energetic and stormy poets, a writer who turns to the natural world with a fierce light.” Edward Hirsch, Washington Post

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“City of Bones is a poet’s testament, his vision of time’s past and future. Composed in a language that is highly intelligent, tightly wrought, and buoyant—the inherent lyric quality derives its swing from reggae, blues, jazz, gospel, and spoken-word traditions—it is a road map tarred in civilizational wisdom. This is an astonishingly fine book. If I were to predict a future Nobel Prize winner in literature, it would more than likely be Kwame Dawes.”—Sudeep Sen, author of EroText and editor of The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry“In this book-length journey, Kwame Dawes guides the reader through the many circles of mnemonic hell. His are poems nailed into the white pages with the force of bestial silence; thick-neck poems written by a poet with hands and ear for old bones, for the shattering of breaking time, for the rituals of manhood. Whenever I picked a new book from the shelf, I always hoped it would be exactly this.” —Valzhyna Mort, author of Factory of Tears“This testament is one of the remarkable books of contemporary English-language letters. I celebrate Dawes and his achievement, and in doing so celebrate all those who have a space in his poems and all those who are able to tune into his remarkable music, intellect, and spirit.”—John Kinsella, author of Jam Tree Gully and Firebreaks“Extending Kwame Dawes’s already wide-ranging and prolific body of work, City of Bones is a testament to a complicated past that replays itself in the daily lives of so many Americans today. In the shadow of the Thirteenth Amendment Dawes remixes the works of August Wilson and brings lucidity to our present moment. Unafraid to trouble the waters and make clear why American race relations exist as they currently do, City of Bones sets the record straight and leaves no doubt that the past is ever present and we have not yet overcome. City of Bones should leave no question in the minds of any contemporary reader that Kwame Dawes is one of the most significant poets working today. This is poetry’s ‘Redemption Song.’”—Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite“Why read Kwame Dawes? Because he knows how to ‘listen for the calm voice of God.’ Because he will show you how to grieve and not be torn open. Because his poem “The Things You Forget in Jail” shares with us empathy so unlike that of most North American poets at work today. Go back to him because Dawes is in love with ‘music of mint, ginger root, garlic, sweet / onion” of our language, its tormented ‘promise of good earth.’ Why read him? Because words ‘when spoken will soften / your chest.’ Why read Kwame Dawes? Because you cannot stop. Because Dawes is the poet to read when ‘all talking / is over’ and you sit alone in this room.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa

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While on assignment for the Virginia Quarterly Review to report on the impact of HIV/AIDS on Jamaica, Kwame Dawes could not prevent himself from writing poems in response to the stories he heard. In a way journalism is not designed to do, these poems pare away detail to reveal the truths of character and situation, and find forms which both give expression to and find a kind of perfection for fleeting, difficult lives. These poems became, in time, this, his fourteenth collection of verse. Powerfully illustrated by Joshua Cogan's photographs, the art of Dawes's poems makes it impossible to see HIV/AIDS as something that only happens to other people, and to marginalise their lives. Here, the experience of the disease becomes the channel for dramas that are both universal and unique, voices that are archetypal and highly individual – stories of despair and stoicism, deception and self-honesty, misery and joy in life.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Kwame Dawes speaks for all those for whom reggae is a major part of life. He describes how reggae has been central to his sense of selfhood, his consciousness of place and society in Jamaica, his development as a writer - and why the singer Ken Boothe should be inseparably connected to his discovery of the erotic.Natural Mysticism is also a work of acute cultural analysis. Dawes argues that in the rise of roots reggae in the 1970s, Jamaica produced a form which was both wholly of the region and universal in its concerns. He contrasts this with the mainstream of Caribbean literature which, whilst anticolonial in sentiment was frequently conservative and colonial in form. Dawes finds in reggae's international appeal more than just an encouraging example. In the work of artists such as Don Drummond, Bob Marley, Winston Rodney and Lee 'Scratch' Perry, he finds a complex aesthetic whose inner structure points in a genuinely contemporary and postcolonial direction. He identifies this aesthetic as being both original and eclectic, as feeling free to borrow, but transforming what it takes in a subversive way. He sees it as embracing both the traditional and the postmodern, the former in the complex subordination of the lyric, melodic and rhythmic elements to the collective whole, and the latter in the dubmaster's deconstructive play with presences and absences. Above all, he shows that it is an aesthetic which unites body, emotions and intellect and brings into a single focus the political, the spiritual and the erotic.In constructing this reggae aesthetic, Kwame Dawes both creates a rationale for the development of his own writing and brings a new and original critical method to the discussion of the work of other contemporary Caribbean authors.Natural Mysticism has the rare merit of combining rigorous theoretical argument with a personal narrative which is often wickedly funny. Here is a paradigm shifting work of Caribbean cultural and literary criticism with the added bonus of conveying an infectious enthusiasm for reggae which will drive readers back to their own collections or even to go out and extend them!"Dawes is an ideal grammarian for the reggae aesthetic, his voice the estuary where his energies as a poet, professor and one-time musician are poured. He bears a gift, rarer than it should be in academia, for intellectually processing his subject and still yielding enlivening writing..."Michael Kuelker, The BeatKwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016 it was, remarkably, doing something quite new. There are of course the conversations implied in the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but no two poets had committed to, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily “structure of call-and-response, each utterance is filtered through the other”. A New Beginning offers, as Karen McCarthy Wolf noted in her review of Speak from Here, the same “warmth and a reassurance … in the correspondence itself, between a black man almost but not quite marooned in the white of America’s Midwest, and a white man negotiating his own exile from the vast physical and historical dissonance of Western Australia”, but there is much that carries that initial dialogue to new depths of trust, self-exposure and intimacy, to the expression of new themes, concerns and investigations of poetic form. This richly multi-layered dialogue arises from responses to each poet’s public world, to the private worlds of family, to the inner world of wondering how one can write “love poems in a time of war, these times of monstrous beasts”, and from the stimulus of the other’s poem arriving in the e-mail in-tray. This is the age of Trump, the monster “Lurking in the shadows”, of the seemingly unstoppable degradation of the Australian environment, of, in John Kinsella’s words, a time when there is no “exoneration or relief” in poetry “but witness and recounting”. Above all, though both poets express their anxieties about the limitations of the prophetic (“the pain of hope, and the terror of faithlessness”), there is the countervailing witness of their immensely fertile imaginative response to each other’s words and the comfort that “On the road, you long for the like-minded” is a longing that is being fulfilled. What is also clear is that for both poets there is also a generous space for the third party to the exchange – the reader.

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Red is a powerful new anthology of work by Black British poets. "Perhaps the most significant thing to be said about Red is that the poets in this volume burst through any constraining label with writing that throbs and pulses and seeps and flows." Margaret BusbyFeaturing: Jackie Kay * Patience Agbabi * Nii Ayikwei Parkes * Raman Mundair * Maya Chowdhry * Dorothea Smartt * Fred D’Aguiar * Linton Kwesi Johnson * Bernardine Evaristo * Roi Kwabena * John Lyons * Lemn Sissay * Grace Nichols * Jack Mapanje * Daljit Nagra * John Agard * Gemma Weekes * Wangui Wa Goro and many more...

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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.

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Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice "sins" on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins.

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A man lies in a newspaper-lined room dreaming an other life. Bob Marley's spirit flew into him at the moment of the singer's death. A woman detaches herself from her perfunctory husband and finds the erotic foreplay she longs for in journeying round the island. A man climbs Blue Mountain Peak to fly and hear the voice of God. Sonia paints her new friend Joan and hopes that this will be the beginning of a sexual adventure. Dawes's characters are driven by their need for intimate contact with people and with God, and their need to construct personal myths powerful enough to live by. In a host of distinctive and persuasive voices they tell stories that reveal their inner lives and give an incisive portrayal of contemporary Jamaican society that is unsparing in confronting its elements of misogyny and nihilistic violence. Indeed several stories question how this disorder can be meaningfully told without either sensationalism or despair. For Dawes, the answer is found in the creative energies that lie just the other side of chaos. In particular, in the dub vershan episodes, which intercut the stories, there are intense and moving celebrations of moments of reggae creation in the studio and in performance. Dawes has established a growing international reputation as a poet and these are stories that combine a poetic imagination with narrative drive, an acute social awareness and a deep inwardness in the treatment of character. In the penultimate story, 'Marley's Ghost', Dawes's imagination soars to towering myth.Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty five books, and is widely recognized as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His next book of poetry from Peepal Tree Press will be 'A New Beginning', a cycle of poems written with John Kinsella. He has been elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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In these 'shrines of remembrance' for the millions of the victims of transatlantic slavery, Kwame Dawes constructs a sequence which laments, rages, mourns, but also celebrates survival. Focusing on individual moments in this holocaust which lasted nearly four hundred years, these poems both cauterize a lingering infection and offer the oil of healing. In these taut lyric pieces, Dawes achieves what might seem impossible: saying something fresh about a subject which, despite attempts at historical amnesia, will not go away. He does it by eschewing sentimentality, rant or playing to the audience, black or white. His poems go to the heart of the historical experience and its contemporary reverberations.This sequence was inspired by the award-winning book, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by the American artist Tom Feelings.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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In Jubilation!, over fifty contemporary Jamaican poets reflect in complex, outspoken, meditative, humorous and outrageous ways on Jamaican independence from Britain and the years that followed.The anthology includes work from the best-known poets of the last fifty years, as well as some of the new and exciting voices in Jamaican poetry today. The authors featured include the work of, among others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Kwame Dawes, Ann-Margaret Lim, Rachel Manley, Shara McCallum, Mervyn Morris, Velma Pollard and Ralph Thompson.Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty books, and is widely recognised as one of the Caribbean's leading writers. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Musgrave Silver Medal, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award 2012 and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship. His latest poetry book is Wheels (2011), and he recently edited Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (2010) and A Bloom of Stones: A Trilingual Anthology of Haitian Poems After the Earthquake (2012), all published by Peepal Tree Press.

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A retired fisherman, Monty Cupidon, encounters a naked, bloodied and traumatised woman standing at the cross-roads. He offers comfort and takes her in. Suffering from amnesia, she cannot tell him anything about herself. The only clues are the signs that she has once worn a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo and red nail polish on her toes. In the absence of memory, he names her Esther. So begins a remarkable sequence of poems that explores many dimensions of liminality. Back of Mount Peace occupies a space between lyric and narrative, between reflection and story. It explores the space between body and mind, making Esther's halting discovery of her self through her body, which like a tree bears its indelible history and, unlike the mind, 'doesn't forget its grievances', work both as moving narrative device and a deeply sensed and sensual reminder of the physicality of existence. Above all, this is a sequence that explores a relationship which begins in a primal Edenic space of innocent discovery in which, as Monty hopes, 'the hallelujah's of new love will begin', but which, like all relationships must enter history, the decay of time and the corruptions of knowledge. In the use of rhyme and other patterns of sound, Back of Mount Peace shows an exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem's insights and moving conclusions.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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When his father dies in suspicious circumstances, Ferron Morgan's trauma is increased by the conflict within his family and his father's friends over whether the death is the result of medical negligence or a political assassination. Ferron has lived in awe of his father's radical commitments but is forced to admit that, with the 1980s' resurgence of the political Right in the Caribbean, his father had lost faith, and was 'already dead to everything that had meaning for him'.Ferron's response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiancée, Dolores, from a brutal rape. He begins, though, to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular to confront his instinct to keep running from trouble.This is a sharply-focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society's scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation. For both Ferron and the society there has been the loss of 'the corpse of one's origins' and the novel points to the need to find a way back before there can be a movement forward.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet’s travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is “a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance…It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father’s example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement…The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging.” Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.

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Resisting the Anomie is the second book of poetry by Kwame Dawes, whose collection Progeny of Air, won Britain's prestigious Forward Trust Poetry Prize for Best First Book in the fall of 1994. In Resisting the Anomie, Dawes takes as his subject the anxiety of being far from home, the unease of not belonging, the sense of disconnection from culture and custom. Poems of Jamaica, of Canada, of Haiti; tightly controlled poems, wild and free poems, reggae poems; poems of rejoicing, of faith, love, anger and humour — Resisting the Anomie is a large collection of substantial works by a new and significant writer.

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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.

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Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, ‘Gbenga Adeoba’s collection Exodus focuses on forms of migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and economic opportunities. Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and place.

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This collection of work by the late Neville Dawes (1926-1984) gives unrivalled access to his thoughts on a rural Jamaican childhood, his exposure to Oxbridge modernism, and his involvement in nationalist ferment, and the frustrations of postcolonial politics.The book makes available the fine poems that Dawes wrote, mostly between 1950 and 1970, both as the young man in London exploring a modernist voice and as the ideologically-committed poet returning to his roots. Fugue also includes the celebrated short stories broadcast on the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme, along with pieces of insightful and humorous autobiography and a section devoted to his critical writing. A long introductory essay by Kwame Dawes brings both a scholar's studied contextualisation and a son's moving insight.Neville Dawes was born in Nigeria in 1926, but grew up in rural Jamaica. He studied for an MA at Oxford, taught in Jamaica, Ghana and Guyana, and was later appointed Director of the Institute of Jamaica. He wrote two novels, The Last Enchantment, reissued by Peepal Tree in 2009 as part of their Caribbean Modern Classics series, and Interim. Always a Marxist, he was deeply immersed in Africa and his nationalist identification with the rural Jamaican working class.

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The Children of Sisyphus is the story of Dinah, a prostitute who lives and fails to find love on the Dungle, the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat. Trapped by patriarchy and male passivity, and cursed by one of her rivals, Dinah is forced into a panicked flight to save herself. But involvement with a revival church and the favour of Shepherd John, who proposes a new life outside Jamaica, leads her to the delusion that she has found escape and meaning, a lived lie that has tragic consequences.In Patterson's brutally poetic existentialist novel, dignity comes with a stoic awareness of the absurdity of life.Introduced by Kwame Dawes.Orlando Patterson was born in Jamaica in 1940. Having studied at the University of the West Indies and at the London School of Economics, in 1970 he took the position of Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard, where he is now John Cowles Professor of Sociology. The Children of Sisyphus received the First Prize for Fiction at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1966. His other novels are An Absence of Ruins (1967) and Die the Long Day (1972). He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999.

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"Impossible Flying" is Dawes' most personal and universal collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. There are moments of transcendence, but often there is 'no epiphany, just the dire cadence of regret' since the failures of the past cannot be undone, and there is no escape from human vulnerability, the disappointment of hopes, bodily decay and death. From that bleak acceptance comes a chastened consolation, and as for poems, 'they are fine and they always find a way to cope/they outlast everything, cynical to the last foot.' The family secrets focus primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his father and younger brother, though in "For Mama" there is a heartfelt and deeply moving acknowledgement of the rocklike unconditionality of a mother's love and care for her family's wounded souls. As ever with Dawes' collections, the rewards come not only from the individual poems, but also from their careful arrangement, internal conversations and from the overarching meanings that emerge from the architecture of the four sections. "Legend" begins the exploration of family mythology and the special place of the youngest brother and the hubristic hopes invested in him. "Estimated Prophet" gives context to the process of the brother's descent into madness and their father's collapse into despair and premature death in the condition of Jamaica in the 1980s when cold war politics and tribal wars brought an end to the dreams of the socialistic 70s, 'that valiant, austere decade'. Here the comic vision of the first section cannot be sustained in writing about 'those chaotic seven years of dust'. This section also deepens the counter-discourse of self-reflection on the act of writing the poems: the confessions of impersonation ('I have stolen much...') and the ambivalent space between history and myth in the filtering of memory and constructed family narratives. The third section, "Brother Love" is set in the present and deals with the renewal of relationship with the brother and the guilty respite of being away 'from the long lament', with marriage, children and 'the peace and constancy/of new homes, while old homes seem/to crumble about us.' The last section, "For My Little Brother" explores the difficult dialogue between these two worlds, between a past that is unalterable and a present that is shaped by it, but that contains its own possibilities. "Impossible Flying" is deeply felt writing that has an intensity and tautness which, if not new in Dawes' work, rises to new levels of eloquence. It is impossible to read this collection without feeling that one's consciousness of what it means to be human has been immeasurably deepened, or without wanting to constantly return to the poems.

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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 spurning designations. Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed—it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated. A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema’s relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry’s capacity for the polyphonic.

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Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Ethiopian American Mahtem Shiferraw’s Fuchsia examines conceptions of the displaced, disassembled, and nomadic self. Embedded in her poems are colors, elements, and sensations that evoke painful memories related to deep-seated remnants of trauma, war, and diaspora. Yet rooted in these losses and dangers also lie opportunities for mending and reflecting, evoking a distinct sense of hope. Elegant and traditional, the poems in Fuchsia examine what it means to both recall the past and continue onward with a richer understanding.

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Since Kwame Dawes first published his prestigious Forward Poetry prize-winning Progeny of Air in 1994, six further collections have followed which have changed the face of Caribbean poetry. New and Selected Poems contains a generous selection from all these volumes, and a book's worth of new poems.Sensitive to the dusty savannahs of Ghana (where he was born), the hills and city streets of Jamaica (where he grew up), the 'low-riding, swamp' landscapes of South Carolina (where he lives) and the landscapes of England (where he regularly visits), Dawes has been building an enthusiastic readership in the UK, the Caribbean and the USA.New and Selected Poems does not replace the earlier collections. Indeed, the selections here will whet the appetite of those who have not yet discovered them to encounter their individual, organic and rewarding architectures and for those familiar with the earlier books, this selection will suggest new ways of reading them.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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2021 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist 2021 Foreword Indies Finalist Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry The poems in The Rinehart Frames seek to exhaust the labyrinths of ekphrasis. By juxtaposing the character of Rinehart from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man with the film 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami, the poems leap into secondary histories, spaces, and languages that encompass a collective yet varied consciousness of being. Cheswayo Mphanza’s collection questions the boundaries of diaspora and narrative through a tethering of voices and forms that infringe on monolithic categorizations of Blackness and what can be intersected with it. The poems continue the conversations of the infinite possibilities of the imagination to dabble in, with, and out of history.

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Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets 2018 Arab American Book Award Winner, Poetry "A taut debut collection of heartfelt poems."—Publishers WeeklyIn her dedication Safia Elhillo writes, “The January Children are the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1.” What follows is a deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one’s own land. The January Children depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan’s history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the asmarani—an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds. No longer content to accept manmade borders, Elhillo navigates a new and reimagined world. Maintaining a sense of wonder in multiple landscapes and mindscapes of perpetually shifting values, she leads the reader through a postcolonial narrative that is equally terrifying and tender, melancholy and defiant.

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This dual language selection of Martin Carter's poems, edited by David Dabydeen, translated into Spanish by Salvador Ortiz-Carbonares and with an introduction by Gemma Robinson, will establish very clearly that Carter is a major South American poet, in the company of Valejo, Neruda and Paz."What we have is enough to prove, if proof has been needed... that Martin Carter is, without reservation, one of the finest poets to have emerged in the Caribbean region. And the varied subtlety and strength of his poetry carries him without any doubt into the first rank of world poets. Long after the politics which prompted a number of his poems have been forgotten, and long after the society which he often so scathingly indicted has been changed utterly the poetry will continue to strike a chord among new generations."Ian McDonaldThe late Martin Carter was without doubt one of the Caribbean's major poets, only less well known than Walcott and Brathwaite because he rarely left his native Guyana. He came to notice first for his Poems of Resistance (1954) written out of his experiences of the anti-colonial struggle which included his imprisonment by the British for his political activities. His work has been a major influence on the current generation of Caribbean poets as John Agard, David Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Kwame Dawes, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols among others have elsewhere testified.Martin Carter was born in Guyana in 1927. He first came to attention with Poems of Resistance in 1954. He is unquestionably one of the three great West Indian poets of his generation. He died in 1997.

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2023 American Book Award 2022 Longlist for the National Book Awards Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Sherry Shenoda’s collection Mummy Eaters follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt. Shenoda forges an imagined path through her ancestor’s mummification and journey to the afterlife. Parallel to this exploration run the implications of colonialism on her passage. The mythology of the ancient Egyptians was oriented toward resurrection through the preservation of the human body in mummification. Shenoda juxtaposes this reverence for the human body as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums. Much of Mummy Eaters is written as a call and response, in the Coptic tradition, between the imagined ancestor and the author as descendant.

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The fourth and final instalment in the poetic conversation, begun in 2014, between poets and friends Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella.

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Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Zimbabwean writer Bernard Farai Matambo’s poems in Stray favor a prose-shaped line as they uncover the contradictory impulses in search of emotional and intellectual truth. Stray not only captures the essence of identity but also eloquently articulates the pain of displacement and speaks to the vulnerability of Africans who have left their native continent. This collection delicately examines the theme of migration—migration in a literal, geographic sense; migration of language from one lexicon to another; migration of a poem toward prose—and the instability of the creative experience in the broader sense.

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Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.

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Hilda Raz has an ability “to tell something every day and make it tough,” says John Kinsella in his introduction. Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been shows readers the evolution of a powerful poet who is also one of the foremost literary editors in the country. Bringing together all seven of her poetry collections, a long out-of-print early chapbook, and her newest work, this collection delights readers with its empathetic and incisive look at the inner and outer lives we lead and the complexities that come with being human. Showcasing the work of a great American voice, Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been at last allows us to see the full scope and range of Raz’s work.

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Kofi Awoonor, one of Ghana’s most accomplished poets, had for almost half a century committed himself to teaching, political engagement, and the literary arts. The one constant that guided and shaped his many occupations and roles in life was poetry. The Promise of Hope is a beautifully edited collection of some of Awoonor’s most arresting work spanning almost fifty years. Selected and edited by Awoonor’s friend and colleague Kofi Anyidoho, himself a prominent poet and academic in Ghana, The Promise of Hope contains much of Awoonor’s most recent unpublished poetry, along with many of his anthologized and classic poems. This engaging volume serves as a fitting contribution to the inaugural cohort of books in the African Poetry Book Series.

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