Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry provides detailed readings of individual poems by women poets whose work has not yet received the sustained critical attention it deserves. These readings are contextualized both within Caribbean cultural debates and postcolonial and feminist critical discourses in a lively and engaged way; revisiting nationalist debates as well as topical issues about the performance of gendered and raced identities within poetic discourse. Newly available in paperback, this book is groundbreaking reading for all those interested in postcolonialism, Gender Studies, Caribbean Studies and contemporary poetry.

This collection is an invaluable academic selection and will provide a fine introduction for the general reader interested in the lyricism of Caribbean poetry.

Representing the best of contemporary voices, this multilingual anthology speaks of a unified aspiration to defy the colonial and paternalistic tradition and create strong new models which positively promote the black women's perspective

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 With a generous sample from each poet, this anthology is an opportunity to discover some of the best, new, previously unpublished voices from the Caribbean.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, Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean, was published in 2014. Kwame Dawes is the author of eighteen collections of poetry, most recently Duppy Conqueror, as well as two novels, numerous anthologies, and plays. He has won Pushcart prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and was the 2013 awardee of the Paul Engel Prize. At the University of Nebraska--Lincoln, he is a Chancellor’s Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. Dawes is the associate poetry editor at Peepal Tree Press, the series editor of the University of South Carolina Poetry Series, and the founding director of the African Poetry Book Fund. Dawes also teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program, and is the director of the biennial Calabash International Literary Festival.

Making History Happen: Caribbean Poetry in America examines Lorna Goodison’s Turn Thanks (1999), McCallum’s The Water Between Us (1999), and Claudia Rankine’s Plot (2001) and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004). Engaging familiar themes and issues of time, language, and identity, the readings focus on “Signifying” moments in the works of the poets under discussion. Reflecting on some of the ways that transnational women poets of the black diaspora are using tropes of mobility to create a renewed sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a communal network, the readings also demonstrate that the project of re-writing individual self-identity in light of one’s expanding consciousness or awareness of the “other” is more urgent, and more demandingly realistic, in contemporary poetry written by women poets who occupy transnational spaces. In these works, re-memory becomes a process that transforms, the gathering of memory reflecting the interrelatedness of communal and individual subjective identities. Rankine’s poetry collections are used to close the discourse in this book, for the call they make. An intriguing crossing of genres, their structural use of time and space reflects the stylistic inventiveness that has become a hallmark of transnational poets of the black diaspora. In its transformation of language, and of images that remain open-ended in their meanings, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely fuses poetry, dialogue, and prose with images from television and other forms of communication media to create a poetic collection that is relentless in its confrontation with the way we make cultural meanings. The collection of essays in this book calls attention to an emerging poetic body of Caribbean writing in America that requires naming, for it is new.