WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING In this astonishing collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.

The Verandah Poems was both a departure and a return for Jean 'Binta' Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention - of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It was Breeze's first new collection after Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and was published on her 60th birthday. Foreword by Kei Miller. With photographs by Tehron Royes.

Investigations of the oxygen carriers range from the characterization of natural populations to measurements of tenths of nanometer distances between atoms. The scope is so great that few biologists and biochemists can fully comprehend the primary literature in its entirety. In addition, the findings of the past two or three decades have advanced the field so rapidly that a truly current account is not readily accessible to a general audience. In recognition of the problem a symposium was held and its proceedings published in the American Zoologist in 1980. Although it included several research reports, most of the contributions were intended to summarize then state-of-the-art information on molecular structure and respiratory function at a level that could be understood by biologists and biochemists who are not experts on our subject. Judging from the reprint requests with which the authors were inundated, the assessment of need had been accurate. I believe that the need for an update, which is wholly focused on communication to the general audience, is even greater in 1992. I therefore asked the authors of this volume to address individuals who might otherwise turn in vain to an advanced textbook of physiology or biochemistry. I have, of course, requested a more comprehensive coverage than would be possible in a general text, but one that is not more parochial. Just as textbooks differ vastly in the level at which their subject matter is presented, so the level of non-expertise was conceived differently by the contributors to this volume.

A powerful poetry picture book from a celebrated contemporary poet and illustrator about the wonder and possibility contained in a single word: letSuppose there was a book full only of the word, let . . .Adapted from a poem called “Book of Genesis” by the celebrated poet Kei Miller and beautifully imagined and illustrated by Diana Ejaita, this provocative and hopeful picture book is an ode to the power of words and of books—of seeing oneself and being seen—and to a world of wonder and possibility.

WINNER OF THE 2014 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize--even to envy--a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman's eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that "constrict like throats," every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

Kei Miller's work was acclaimed by the distinguished Jamaican writer Olive Senior as 'Some of the most exciting poetry I've read in years...An extraordinary new voice singing with clarity and grace'. "A Light Song of Light" sings in the rhythms of ritual and folktale, praise songs and anecdotes, blending lyricism with a cool wit, finding the languages in which poetry can sing in dark times. The book is in two parts: Day Time and Night Time, each exploring the inseparable elements that together make a whole. Behind the daylight world of community lies another, disordered, landscape: stories of ghosts and bandits, a darkness violent and seductive. At the heart of the collection is the Singerman, a member of Jamaica's road gangs in the 1930s, whose job was to sing while the rest of the gang broke stones. He is a presence both mundane and shamanic. Kei Miller's poems celebrate 'our incredible and abundant lives', facing the darkness and making from it a song of the light.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE In this astonishing collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.

When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020. Longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet - the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.

WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR CARIBBEAN LITERATURE SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE, THE GREEN CARNATION PRIZE, and the HISTORICAL WRITERS AWARD 'Miller's storytelling is superb' SUNDAY TIMES One April day in Augustown, Jamaica. Ma Taffy, old and blind, sits in her usual spot on the veranda. No matter how the world tilts around her, come hurricane or riot, she knows everything that goes on in this small community. Which is why, when her six-year-old nephew returns home from school with his dreadlocks shorn, she realises that trouble won't be far behind. And so she tells him the story of Alexander Bedward, the flying preacherman. She remembers what happened to the Rastaman and his helper, Bongo Moody; she thinks of Soft-Paw, the leader of the Angola gang, and what lies beneath her house. For trouble is brewing once more among the ramshackle lanes of Augustown, and as Ma Taffy knows, each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, each day contains all of history...

"Miller is a name to watch."--"The Independent"

"This is magical, lyrical, spellbinding writing."--"Granta"

Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica's last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of "warning": the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear--people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital.

Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with the mysterious "Mr. Writer Man," who has a tale of his own to share, one that will cast Adamine's life in an entirely new light. In a story about magic and migration, stories and storytelling, and the New and Old Worlds, we discover it is never one person who owns a story or has the right to tell it.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1978, Kei Miller is the author of "The Same Earth," winner of the Una Marson Prize for Literature; and "Fear of Stones," which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. His most recent poetry collection has been shortlisted for the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2008 he was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Miller currently divides his time between Jamaica and Scotland.

There is a greeting used in urban America, 'What's good?', which seems to go beyond a mere 'How are you?' or 'What's happening?' to demand an optimistic response. Perhaps, writes the young Jamaican poet Kei Miller in his introduction to "New Caribbean Poetry", there is a need for optimism when speaking of poetry and of the Caribbean, two entities that are frequently sidelined in all kinds of ways. This remarkable new anthology seeks to rectify both these oversights by showcasing new and newly established Caribbean poets from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere. So, 'what's good' in Caribbean poetry today? Miller offers eight impressive answers: Christian Campbell, Loretta Collins, Delores Gauntlett, Shara McCallum, Marilene Phipps, Jennifer Rahim, Tanya Shirley and Ian Strachan. Moving beyond the legacies of Scott, Walcott, Goodison and Braithwaite, these writers are forging a new and multifarious 'identity' for Caribbean poetry. There is a freshness to their voices which is nonetheless firmly rooted in poetic craft.

The six sequences of "There Is an Anger that Moves" travel from Jamaica to England and back. A mother's heart is broken; men fall in love secretly; people dance until they die. Religion haunts these disbelieving poems which move sometimes to the measure of a hymn, sometimes to the cadence of a Baptist sermon. Each swells with its own conviction, even when that conviction is doubt. Miller makes us believe in the power of unexpected things: the colour orange, broken coffins, ice cream - and in the transforming power of poetry. From this book, Kei Miller emerges as one of the most compelling and subtle new voices from the Caribbean.

From the WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2014, a 'humorous, bittersweet fiction, combin[ing] the fantastical realism of Marquez with the domestic comedy of Andrea Levy' INDEPENDENT It all begins with the theft of Tessa Walcott's panties... After the hurricane of 1974, Jamaica is devastated. Imelda Richardson is sent to England, without a place to stay or a plan of what to do. Luckily sheis taken in by Purletta Johnson, a member of the ex-pat bourgeoisie who has decided to become more Jamaican than any Jamaican: sucking her teeth, sporting a gold tooth, and growing ganja on her balcony. But when her mother dies Imelda returns to Jamaica. When Tessa Walcott's panties are stolen, she and Imelda set up a Neighbourhood Watch. But they haven't counted on Pastor Braithwaite who denounces them in Church. The church-goers turn on Imelda, and when the river suddenly floods her home it is seen as a punishment from God. A Pentecostal fervour sweeps through the village of Watersgate, fuelled by Evangelist Millie. In her last great crusade, Miss Millie organises 'fire to burn their sins away', equipping the villagers with kerosene as they set about burning everything. Now they are marching on the gay man's house and only Imelda can save him.

"Miller is a name to watch." The Independent "This is magical, lyrical, spellbinding writing." Granta Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica's last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of "warning": the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital. Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with the mysterious "Mr. Writer Man," who has a tale of his own to share, one that will cast Adamine's life in an entirely new light. In a story about magic and migration, stories and storytelling, and the New and Old Worlds, we discover it is never one person who owns a story or has the right to tell it. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1978, Kei Miller is the author of The Same Earth, winner of the Una Marson Prize for Literature; and Fear of Stones, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. His most recent poetry collection has been shortlisted for the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2008 he was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Miller currently divides his time between Jamaica and Scotland.