What Storm, What Thunder
What Storm, What Thunder (Tin House Books), the new novel by Haitian-Canadian-American Myriam J.A. Chancy, is set in the aftermath of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince. Following and weaving together the stories of multiple characters with divergent backgrounds, the novel is “a singular, stunning record,” writes the publisher, “a reckoning of the heartbreaking […]
Salvatori
A Plethora of Dead Ends
A Plethora of Dead Ends (Notion Press) by Lance Dowrich — winner of the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region — is a short fiction collection with a comic twist, examining the twists and absurdities of life in the contemporary Caribbean. His main character, Ethelbert G. Sandiford, “navigates through his dead-end life […]
Matters Arising
Matters Arising (Royards) by Kenneth Ramchand collects a number of the eminent literary scholar’s newspaper columns originally published in the Trinidad Guardian, ranging in subject from books, writers, and culture more broadly to politics, sports, and current affairs. Trenchantly argued and full of insights, this volume reminds the reader what doing intellectual work in public […]
Monster in the Middle
Monster in the Middle (Penguin Random House), the second novel by USVI-born Tiphanie Yanique, traces family histories across decades to “map the emotional inheritance” of a young couple in love in New York City. Ranging from the Caribbean to West Africa to the US, charting “family lore and love stories” across generations, the novel “posits […]
Nature’s Wild
Nature’s Wild: Love Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press) by Trinidad-born Andil Gosine “engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean.” Chapters range from recounting the author’s experiences at an all-boys secondary school in Trinidad to examining the work of […]
Sanctuaries of Invention
Sanctuaries of Invention (Peepal Tree Press), the sixth collection of poems by Trinidadian writer Jennifer Rahim — winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — tackles up-to-the-moment subjects like the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate change crisis, while meditating on bigger questions of time, human nature, and how our lives are shaped […]
The Annual Migration of Clouds
The Annual Migration of Clouds (ECW Press) by Caribbean-Canadian Premee Mohamed is a “post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella” set in the prairie province of Alberta in the aftermath of a climate disaster, where “a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her […]
A Different Me, A Better You
A Map to the Door of No Return
All the Names Given
Chaos in Castries
Lepers and Love in Trinidad
The Ferguson Report
The Kids
When Life Gives You Mangoes
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire (University of the West Indies Press), a new short biography of the iconic Martiniquan writer by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, is the latest title in UWI Press’s Caribbean Biography Series. A founder of the Négritude movement in the 1930s, Césaire “explored the contours of this African heritage and his complex identity as a Black man […]
Cuba
Cuba: An American History (Scribner) by Ada Ferrer is an epic account of the centuries-long relationship between the Caribbean’s largest island and its powerful neighbour to the north, “written for a moment that demands a new reckoning.” Cuba-born Ferrer, now a professor of history at New York University, “provides us with a front-row seat as […]
Cutlish
In Cutlish (Four Way Books), his latest collection of poems, Guyanese-American writer Rajiv Mohabir “creates a form migrated from Caribbean chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker…. By joining the disparate threads of his fading, often derided, multilingual Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Bhojpuri linguistic inheritances, Mohabir mingles the ghosts […]
Disorientation
Disorientation: Being Black in the World (Random House Canada), the latest book by Giller Prize–winning Trinidad-born writer Ian Williams, is a collection of essays inspired by James Baldwin, “in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas.” Specifically, ideas about race and racism, and how these intersect in sometimes unexpected and uncomfortable ways with […]
Ring
Ring (Coash House Books), the latest novel by Trinidad-born Andre Alexis, is the fifth and final novel in his groundbreaking “Quincunx Cycle”, which began with 2014’s Pastoral. Although the five novels each stand alone, they are linked by recurring characters, locations, situations, and themes. In Ring, Alexis explores the form of literary romance through the […]
The Voyage
The Voyage (Mawenzi House) is a book of poems by H. Nigel Thomas, the Vincentian-Canadian writer best known for his novels and short stories. Bringing together older and newer poems “culled from a lifetime of meditations on self, family, time, and aging,” the book “also reflects on political and social aspects of human lives, such […]
Down by the River
Pastoral
Can You Sign My Tentacle?
Can You Sign My Tentacle? (Interstellar Flight Press) is a genre-flipping chapbook of “horror poems” by Trinidadian Brandon O’Brien. The collection “explores the monsters we know and the ones that hide behind racism, sexism, and violence,” writes the publisher, “resulting in poems that are both comic and cosmic.”
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 […]
Antiman
Ring Shout
Sweethand
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 […]