Triage
Triage (Graywolf Press/ Allen Lane) by Claudia Rankine, the newest work from the critically lauded Jamaican-American poet and essayist, is a composite publication melding the genres of memoir, literary criticism, biography, and lyric essay. Triage explores the frayed relationship between two former friends, now marked by decades of silence, while paralleling their ruptured bond to […]
Ground Provisions
Ground Provisions (Peepal Tree Press), the debut book of poems by Jamaica-born, US-based Shauna Morgan, uses a deep engagement with the natural world to grapple with the making and remaking of uprooted and transplanted selves. These poems “interrogate power, follow the desire for freedom, explore the necessity of ancestral memory, and answer the crucial need […]
Fugitive Tilts
Fugitive Tilts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Ishion Hutchinson is the Jamaican poet’s debut book of essays, composed in a tone at once meditative and expansive, as Hutchinson muses on history, race, travel, and his life in reading. The sea, as ancestral repository and pervasive metaphor, reoccurs in several of the essays—as cautionary tale, as […]
Dante’s Inferno
Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation (Carcanet Press), by former Poet Laureate of Jamaica Lorna Goodison reconstitutes the 14th century narrative, so it is told in both Jamaican Patois and Jamaican English. Goodison’s Dante proceeds through the caverns of the underworld, guided by none other than the iconic Louise Bennett, “Miss Lou”. Other inspiring and well-known […]
Paradise Once
Paradise Once (Akashic Books), the newest historical novel by Jamaican author Olive Senior, emphasises the importance of the indigenous Taíno people in the Caribbean. Senior, who won the overall 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, focuses the narrative of Paradise Once on four survivors of a massacre. Imbuing their journeys with a mixture of […]
Last Reel
Last Reel (Ian Randle Publishers) is the eighth book of poems by Mervyn Morris, former Poet Laureate of Jamaica. Morris, who held the laureateship from 2014 to 2017, is Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. The short and tautly-plotted poems in Last Reel adopt various, diverse foci, ranging from the […]
The House of Plain Truth
The House of Plain Truth (Zibby Media), Donna Hemans’s second novel, triangulates Jamaica, Brooklyn, and Cuba as it navigates a family’s tempestuous journey through migration, caregiving, and traumatic sibling dynamics.
School of Instructions
US-based Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s third collection, School of Instructions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), began as a commission investigating the experiences of West Indian soldiers during the First World War. The book developed this research into a wide-ranging meditation that encompasses boyhood, martial rule, civil unrest, and coming of age in perilous eras. Hutchinson’s methodological […]
How to Say Babylon
How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster), the debut memoir by Safiya Sinclair, winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, is a tempestuous reckoning with the author’s Rastafari upbringing beneath the yoke of a didactic patriarch. Sinclair juxtaposes the natural beauty of her girlhood’s Jamaican landscape with the strict, often punitive edicts issued […]
Archipelagos
Archipelagos (Peepal Tree Press), the eighth book of poems by US-based Jamaican Geoffrey Philp, begins with a vision of Columbus and his crew arriving in the Caribbean “spurred by fever” for gold and conquest, and ends with a quotation from Bob Marley: “We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.” The poems collected between these poles […]
Self-Portrait as Othello
Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet), the sophomore poetry collection by Jamaica-born, UK-based Jason Allen-Paisant, reinvents the damning stereotype of Othello’s Moor, in experimental and ekphrastic verses. Thinking with Trees, Allen-Paisant’s first book of poems, won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry: his second collection is as sensitively wrought, more directly interfacing with the politics of […]
Fire Rush
Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape, UK; Viking, US), a novel sixteen years in the making from Jamaica-born, UK-based Jacqueline Crooks, centres Black womanhood in 1970s London and Bristol. Longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Fire Rush follows protagonist Yamaye through a dancehall and dub-infused club scene, while she yearns for deeper connections to her […]
I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be
I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Jonathan Cape), subtitled “A Memoir in Eight Lives”, reflects Colin Grant’s family journey through respectability and race politics, shaping a domestic sphere that is at once intensely personal and universal. Born in Britain to Jamaican parents, Grant approaches the story of his family with rare transparency, showing […]
The Islands
The Islands (Catapult), a new book of short fiction by Jamaican-descended Canadian Dionne Irving, ranges over continents and decades to tell the restless stories of Jamaican women at home and in the far-flung diaspora. These characters — immigrants from Jamaica or the offspring of immigrants — grapple with practicalities of displacement, self-reinvention, and the finding […]
If I Survive You
If I Survive You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the debut book of fiction by Jamaican-American Jonathan Escoffery, offers a sequence of linked short stories about a Jamaican family who migrate to Miami in the 1970s, and the consequences over subsequent decades of this uprooting on the protagonist Trelawny. Born in the US, surrounded by but […]
Selected Poems
Selected Poems (Penguin) by Linton Kwesi Johnson is a new, expanded edition of an essential text, offering a four-decade survey of the groundbreaking work of the Jamaica-born, Britain-based poet. Early classics like the timeless “Inglan Is a Bitch” rub shoulders with new work from the past decade, while an introduction by journalist Gary Younge explains […]
Shell
Over the Roofs of the World
What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You
What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You (Virago), the debut novel by Jamaican Sharma Taylor, begins with an eighteen-year-old Jamaican woman giving her newborn son up for adoption — setting off a decades-long story of family, identity, and inheritance, vividly set in contemporary Jamaica.
Moon Witch, Spider King
Moon Witch, Spider King (Riverhead), the second volume in the Dark Star Trilogy by Jamaican Marlon James, gives an alternative account of the events told in its predecessor Black Leopard, Red Wolf, this time from the perspective of Sogolon the Moon Witch.
Talking of Trees
Hurricane Watch
Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems (Carcanet Press), a new volume by Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior, brings together her four previous books of poems — Talking of Trees, Gardening in the Tropics, Over the Roofs of the World, and Shell — with a sequence of new work.
A Fierce Green Place
A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems (New Directions), a collection of “rebellious, innovative” poems by Canada-based Jamaican Pamela Mordecai, spans her three-decade literary career, covering subjects as diverse as Biblical and colonial history, family tragedy, and the defiance of vernacular Caribbean culture.
When Life Gives You Mangoes
A Different Me, A Better You
Make the World New
Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfred Laurier University Press) is a long overdue summation of the work of the Jamaica-born dub poet, considered “one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada.” The volume brings together selected poems from across Allen’s career, including previously unpublished work, with an introduction by […]
No Ruined Stone
No Ruined Stone (Peepal Tree), a collection of poems by Jamaica-born Shara McCallum (a past winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for poetry), contemplates an alternate history. In 1786, the poet Robert Burns — one of Scotland’s major cultural icons — accepted an offer to travel to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a […]
These Ghosts Are Family
These Ghosts Are Family, 2021 OCM Bocas Prize Fiction Winner and the first book by US-based Jamaican Maisy Card, portrays a family and its entanglements over multiple generations. “At its heart,” said the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize judges, “is the story of Caribbean enslavement and the legacy of trauma it has passed down from generation to […]
Zion Roses
Zion Roses (Peepal Tree Press) is the second book of poems by Jamaican Monica Minott. The publisher describes the collection as “a constant dialogue between four quadrants of engagement: with history, with landscape, with personal and family experience, and with the worlds of literature, music and art. Minott’s sense of history is deeply informed by […]
The Children of Sisyphus
Orlando Patterson’s first novel was inspired by existentialist Albert Camus, and is the “brutally poetic” portrayal of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community that depicts the lives of those trapped in the poverty, crime, and religious extremism of the slums of Kingston. “The introduction by Kwame Dawes notes, amongst other things, how long before reggae became a […]