First published 2016
These poems move between Jamaica and America, tracing the journey of a speaker caught between worlds. She recalls her Caribbean childhood while navigating race relations in her new country. The speaker embodies both Eve and Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest, becoming a hybrid figure of creation and rebellion. Her body transforms into landscape and predator, reflecting the violence of displacement. The poems examine what it means to be a woman marked as other, to inhabit a form that feels foreign even to herself. Home becomes unreachable, existing only in memory and myth. The female speaker claims the role of cannibal, turning the colonial gaze back on itself. Through intense imagery and mythic resonance, these verses map the territory between exile and belonging, between the body as sanctuary and the body as battlefield.
Genres: american-fiction, african-american, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: exile-and-belonging, hybrid-figure
Setting: Jamaica, America
Period: 21st-century
112 pages · ebook · University of Nebraska Press
Content warnings: violence