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.

Here is an opportunity to discover some of the best new, unpublished poets from the Caribbean. With a generous sample from each poet, there are new writers from Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia, St Vincent and Guyana.Meet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune and her richly gothic take on love and its complications; Danielle Jennings' exuberant narratives of family history and the struggles for respect between men and women; Ruel Johnson's often witty attempts to confront the insanity of contemporary Guyana's race wars and political corruption through the formal coolness of poetry; Monica Minott's frank celebrations of women's sexuality and her attempt to re-enter the world of spirit possession and trance; Debra Providence's spare womanist reflections that pack a more devastating punch by saying more with less; Shivanee Ramlochan's confidently experimental poems that explore the threatening uncertainties of the present through the imagery of speculative fictions set in some post-disaster world; Colin Robinson's polyphonic, modernist reflections on the queer Caribbean and its joys and sorrows; and Sassy Ross's tightly structured explorations of memory between the here and there of St Lucia and New York. Here is a generation that has absorbed Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter and Lorna Goodison, but has found its own distinctive voices, themes and formal models.Each of the contributors is well on the way to having their own first collections.Coming Up Hot is the second publication of Peekash Press, a joint imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, as part of CaribLit project.

For six months during 2015, two poets known for their capacity to create lyric responses to the complex realities around them, yet poets fully inscribed in both a western literary tradition and other longer traditions that have been marginalized, exchanged poems that were in constant dialogue even as they remained wholly defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives. Kwame Dawes base was flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a mid-American landscape in which he, a black man, felt at once alien and curiously committed to the challenges of finding home; and John Kinsella s base was in the wide open violently beautiful landscape of western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and heavy with the language of ecological change, political ineptitude and artistic defiance. E-mail was the bridge. These two poets found themselves in the middle of the swirl of political and social upheavals in their spheresDawes contemplating race in the crucible of police killings of black bodies in the US, and Kinsella carrying the weight of contemplating and challenging the injustice of the theft of indigenous land and country in Australia and the terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants in that country. These poems reflect the very different worlds that have shaped these writers, and in the wonderful way that poetry can chart the unpredictable journey towards friendship. They also reflect commonalities: love of family, regret, cricket, art, politics, music, and travel. Indeed, there is much in these poems that provides us with a remarkable accounting of what can occupy and frighten and delight two thinking and creative men who have devoted a great deal of energy and time into making poems in the day to day unfolding of our world. The pleasure that is seeded into the poems is apparentin poem after poem one senses just how each is hungry and anxious to hear from the other and to then treat the surprises and revelations that arrive as triggers for his own lyricintrospective, risky, complex and formally considered and beautiful. The respect and admiration that these two poets have for each other is apparent in the poemsin the echoes, in the ways in which they stretch one another, and in the ease of languagea kind of poetic honesty that comes from authority, assurance, and curiosity. This was an accidental pairingan email exchange between an editor and a poet that blossomed into a dare of sorts, and then into a project that came under the brilliant scrutiny of two prolific artists writing at the height of their poetic strength. Speak from Here to There reminds us of the ways that poetry can offer comfort and solace to the poet and how, at the same time, it can supply the ignition for a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches us all."

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.

Inspired by the word "red," this collection of poems written by black British writers--including both established authors and new, exciting poets--explores the subjects and ideas stirred by a single trigger, from the word's usual associations with blood, violence, passion, and anger, as well as with sensuality and sexuality, to more surprising interpretations such as the link to a particular mood, the quality of light in the sky, the color of skin, and the sound of a song. This remarkable compilation succeeds in generating poems that find an intriguing resonance with each other while also revealing images and themes unique to the individual poets.

"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.

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?

Paterson Award for Literary Excellence.

"Dawes's verse has an expressive power and lyric resonance that can be attributed to a trans-Atlantic consciousness weaned on the spiritual sources of reggae."--"New York Times Book Review"

"Raised in Jamaica, Dawes takes some of his cues, and this book's title, from reggae music. But his voice in these long and short poems and sequences selected from each of his many books, which began appearing in the mid-1990s, is crystal clear, accessible and serious, mixing a timeless myth-making energy with a strong contemporary conscience..." --National Public Radio

"This first U.S. selection from the Jamaica-bred, Nebraska-based poet (he also has a reputation in Britain) is his 16th book of verse in just 20 years; it reveals a writer syncretic, effusive, affectionate, alert to familial joys, but also sensitive to history, above all to the struggles of African diasporic history--the Middle Passage, sharecropper-era South Carolina, the Kingston of Bob Marley, whose song gives this big book its title. Dawes is at home with cityscape and seascape, patois and transatlantic tradition." --"Publishers Weekly"

" Dawes] is highly original and intelligent, possessing poetic sensibility that is rooted and sound, unshakeable and unstopped, both in its vibrancy and direction. He writes poetry as it ought to be written."--"World Literature Today"

"Dawes asserts himself as man and artist and finally, with grace achieved and grace said, sits down to begin life's tragic feast . . . a writer of major significance."--"Brag Book"

"The notion of a reggae aesthetic--of the language moving to a different rhythm, under different kinds of pressure . . . underpins all Dawes' work as poet."--Stewart Brown

Born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica, and educated in Canada, Kwame Dawes is a dynamic and electrifying poet. In this generous collection, new poems appear with the best work from fifteen previous volumes. Deeply nuanced in exploring the human condition, Dawes' poems are filled with complex emotion and consistently remind us what it means to be a global citizen.

From "The Lessons":

"Fingers can be trained to make shapes
that, pressed just right on the gleaming
keys, will make a sound that can stay
tears or cause them to flow for days.
Anyone can learn to make some music,
but not all have the heart to beat
out the tunes that will turn us inside out. . . "

Kwame Dawes is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, two novels, four anthologies, and numerous essays and plays. In 2009 he won an Emmy Award for his interactive website, LiveHopeLove.com. Since 2011 he has taught at the University of Nebraska, and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Using the power of language to explore and discover patterns of meaning, this 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 a terrorist attack reflecting on the nature of grace, a president considering the function of art, or a Rastafarian defending his faith, the selections all seek illumination in understanding the world. They are as much about the quest for love and faith as they are about finding pathways of meaning through the current decade of wars and political and economic uncertainty.

In this collection, the uncertain paths of childhood and adulthood are traced through a sequence of poems that treat Idlewild--a place deep in the heart of rural Jamaica--as a character, a constant that serves as a reliable touchstone for memory. Although the majority of the poems are centered on themes of security and pleasant memory, the edges are haunted with truths of rupture in family relations, abandonment, loneliness, resentment of unreliable men, and the challenges of maintaining faith through difficult times. Balancing nostalgia for the past with an acute awareness of the present--the poverty, violence, class divides, and racial complexities of modern day Jamaica--the central voice of the poem matures along with the subject matter to gradually unveil a well-formed poetic voice with an authoritative command of form and language.

In this compilation, more than 50 contemporary Jamaican poets reflect in outspoken, meditative, humorous, and outrageous ways upon the historical and existential moment of Jamaican independence. Ranging from the lyric and the pastoral to the declarative and the celebratory, these poems employ language registers across the full spectrum of Jamaican English and patois. Often surprising and sometimes alarming, this book affirms the contributors recognition of what it means to be Jamaican."

Frank and earnest, this moving collection of poetry offers a glimpse into the support centers and hospice outside of Montego Bay and the many lives that have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Culled from open dialogue with sufferers and those who care for them, and coupled with evocative photographs, AIDS becomes a channel for universal dramas, archetypal voices, stoicism, despair, and deeply human deceptions. Full of memories of a time when diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence, each piece brings the lives of the indiscriminant victims to the forefront and battles the notion that this can only happen to others.

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.

The first book ever to look in-depth at reggae as an artistic form, "Natural Mysticism" shows how reggae combines politics, sex, spirituality and art, and offers in depth analyzes of leading reggae artists such as Burning Spear, Lee Scratch Perry and Bob Marley.

Sparkling with sharp wit and off-kilter humor, this emotional collection shows a distinctly contemporary and urban Jamaica through the eyes of a surrealist whose sharp imagery and precise language expose the absurdities and contradictions of society. Written in a distinctly female voice that is modern and experimental, these poems explore a wide range of subjects, from the erotic to the ironic, with sophistication and imagination.

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.

Since the publication of her first collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum has steadily created a rich body of poems that have mined the rich deposit of emotional and intellectual capital found in her background of multiple migrations, culturally and geographically. McCallum's poems reflect her rooting in a Jamaican experience unique for her childhood in a Rastafarian home filled with reckless idealism, the potential for profound emotional pathology, and the grounding of old folks traditions. Her work has explored what it means to emerge from such a space and enter a new world of American landscapes and values. The Face of Water collects some of Shara Mccallum's best poems, poems that establish her as a poet of deft craft (and craftiness), whose sense of music is caught in her mastery of syntax and her ear for the graceful line.

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.