Search results for ""Author Loretta Collins Klobah""
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Ricantations
Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Ricantations will reinforce the perception of Loretta Collins Klobah as superb poetic story-teller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences. There are absorbingly reflective poems on Velasquez’ paintings of an hyperphagic child, painted both naked and clothed, a stray horse that hangs around the poet’s property, homunculi in glass bottles in a teaching hospital, the keeper of a butterfly farm, a high-wire circus family, and the irony of Nathan Leopold (with Loeb, the perpetrator of a famously brutal crime in the USA) becoming the expert on Puerto Rican bird life.Poems begin from the most fantastic premises – a Che Guevera club in heaven with prizes for the coolest Che impersonator – then line by rich baroque line open up her island’s secret heart, revealing a society under multiple pressures even before Hurricane Maria, about which the title poem offers a brilliantly hallucinatory picture. Love must always be mixed with despair in a society where the reckless machismo of New Year gunfire kills a young woman, and older men prey on schoolgirls.New World English and Spanish rub shoulders in these poems, but the reader soon picks up the precise, word-loving, observant rhythms of the poet’s own voice, a voice which has space for humour, as in a witty sequence of Jamaican poems about the attraction to men of women of ample size.There are more personal and intimate poems – memories of her mother’s psychiatric hospitalisation, of her own struggles with size and health, and the vulnerability of the body when a hurricane can strip life back to its hazardous basics.
£9.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Twelve Foot Neon Woman
Shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.Loretta Collins Klobah sends us a twelve-foot woman with red neon surging through her veins, who boldly and gracefully takes on the challenges of urban life. Keen observer and witness, our warner woman turns her electric gaze to the everyday world and its extraordinary people. Against a soundtrack of world music, from salsa to reggae to jazz, and in a vibrant blend of English, Spanish and patois, she delivers by turns tender and incendiary hymns of homage to the Caribbean, American and British metropolis. Splendid, though endangered, nature and the spirit-world pervade the city, offering green-hearted hope for the future.Loretta Collins Klobah lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a Professor of Caribbean Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico. She was one of eight poets featured in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry, edited by Kei Miller (Carcanet, 2007), and her poetry was also anthologised in the 1996 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry and scholarly essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the UK and the US.
£8.99
Peepal Tree Press Ltd The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento: A bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by women writers of the English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean
The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento is the first bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by women writers of the English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its diasporas to be curated in more than two decades. The anthology presents a selection of work by poets from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and from various Anglophone Caribbean islands and the Diaspora. Each poem is presented first in the original, followed by the translation. Excitingly, the majority of poets have not yet been widely translated or included in a bilingual anthology of this scope.
£14.99
