Words Need Love Too

by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Poetry. African American Studies. Kamau Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930, and found a rootedness in Africa that would sharpen his sense of "wholeness" and shape his awareness. His published works have surged his international standing, but since MIDDLEPASSAGES (1992, also available from SPD), the literary world has seemingly been expecting another major volume of poetry from him. WORDS NEED LOVE TOO represents that long awaited collection, and is, perhaps, Brathwaite's most concentrated effort at fashioning a new literary tradition out of the fragmented pieces/rhythms/nation languages that form the New World. The poems in this volume are "dreamstories." It is a harvest of dreams of a new word, cleansed in ancestral blood, loved without reservation by those born into it and with it, so that through it, they can shape a new reality, a new destiny. No other poet, living or dead, makes us participants in, and co-celebrants of, the liturgy of the word like Brathwaite.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 2000

About the author

Edward Kamau Brathwaite is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.

Brathwaite held a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and was a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum.

Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770 - 1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.