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Cannibal
Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.
126 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2016
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About the author
Safiya Sinclair
6 books722 followersSafiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.
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August 13, 2023If you like your poetry rich and dense and don't mind occasionally scratching your head and saying, "Huh?" Jamaican native Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal might make its way into your provisions. Themes include family, race, feminism, race, history, race, sex, race, and the sexes (among others).
Some turns of phrases give me pause and cause me to read again. Others either fly over my head or under my feet (and what's the difference, really?). Example poem:
Confessor
This is where you leave me.
Filling of old salt and ponderous,
what’s left of your voice in the air.
Blue honeycreeper thrashed out
to a ragged wind, whole months
spent crawling this white beach
raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing
the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides.
Out here I am the body invented naked,
woman emerging from cold seas, herself
the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles,
who must believe with all her puckering
holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits
forth, what must turn red eventually.
The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling
bird scratching its one message; the arm
you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean.
Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new
as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex.
I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces
with the run-down sun, count fires
in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot,
studying their scarred window-plagues,
nightshade my own throat closed tight
against a hard hand. Then all comes mute
in my glittering eye. All is knocked back,
slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic
tiles approaching, the blur of a beard.
The white tusk of his ocean goring me.
This world unforgiving in its boundaries.
The day’s owl and its omen
slipping a bright hook
into my cheek —
Some turns of phrases give me pause and cause me to read again. Others either fly over my head or under my feet (and what's the difference, really?). Example poem:
Confessor
This is where you leave me.
Filling of old salt and ponderous,
what’s left of your voice in the air.
Blue honeycreeper thrashed out
to a ragged wind, whole months
spent crawling this white beach
raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing
the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides.
Out here I am the body invented naked,
woman emerging from cold seas, herself
the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles,
who must believe with all her puckering
holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits
forth, what must turn red eventually.
The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling
bird scratching its one message; the arm
you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean.
Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new
as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex.
I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces
with the run-down sun, count fires
in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot,
studying their scarred window-plagues,
nightshade my own throat closed tight
against a hard hand. Then all comes mute
in my glittering eye. All is knocked back,
slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic
tiles approaching, the blur of a beard.
The white tusk of his ocean goring me.
This world unforgiving in its boundaries.
The day’s owl and its omen
slipping a bright hook
into my cheek —
December 1, 2025
Safiya Sinclair is a wordsmith and this was truly exceptional.
July 16, 2018
Dense, lush, hypnotic. The beauty of these poems is mesmerizing, lulling you into their rage and examination of what race means in America, who the poet is as a woman, as well as her relationship with her birth home in Jamaica. I was completely caught up and in these poems.
March 8, 2017
I read this because it is one of the nominees for the Dylan Thomas Prize, a list that continues to provide me with poets I've never heard of. Safiya Sinclair is a Jamaican-American, turning her focus to place and identity and the body, while also layering on some imagery and characters from Shakespeare. (I'm not sure I picked up on everything on that layer.) There is also a connection to the etymology of the word "cannibal," with its ties to the Caribe people (after a few connections.) This idea of consuming the body, in a variety of ways, threads throughout these poems and is a smart name for the collection.
May 4, 2019
I will grow heavy and silent
and sick. I will strip you right down
to the bone. I will take your name.
I will take your home
and wake dark with a song
on which you finally choke;
my black hair furring thick
in the gawk of your throat.
+wangechi mutu, water woman
—
Tell the hounds who undress
me with their eyes—I have nothing
to hide. I will spread myself
wide. Here, a flesh of muscle. Here,
some blood in the hunt. Now the center
of the world: my incandescent cunt.
—
Nobody warned you, cold as bone,
how this hair uproots antenna, red-ant stinger,
this kiss and this kiss a thick nettle.
No room on the boat for me.
No Bible passage.
No field guide to advise you to dress for fire,
to bring a thicker whip.
That what you thought was simple sparrow
was Jamaican grassquit.
September 3, 2023
rich, dense, hypnotic, lyrical. gorgeous.
May 8, 2022
from In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing
(...) Jamaica, if I wear your lunacy like a dark skin,
or lock this day away in the voodoo-garden
of our parting, know that I still mimic your wails,
knee-deep in beach, know I am gouging the stars
for any trace of ghost. For the algorithm
of uncertain history. The simple language
of our cannibal sea. If Grandfather,
your wandering fishermen still recast
their lives down on the disappearing shore,
know I too am scorching there.
Igniting and devouring
each abducted day.
(...) Jamaica, if I wear your lunacy like a dark skin,
or lock this day away in the voodoo-garden
of our parting, know that I still mimic your wails,
knee-deep in beach, know I am gouging the stars
for any trace of ghost. For the algorithm
of uncertain history. The simple language
of our cannibal sea. If Grandfather,
your wandering fishermen still recast
their lives down on the disappearing shore,
know I too am scorching there.
Igniting and devouring
each abducted day.
November 5, 2021
gorgeous, definitely requires a reread, not to be read through haphazardly. 3.5ish and my reading experience probably suffered because this is the first (published) book i’ve finished in weeks (so my focus was shot throughout).
Pity the owl-moth thay struck with its all its might, / night’s shutters unopening. Moon at my window, / one slow eye, known-wound / I am salting as proof of existence.
Read
April 9, 2025"Our mouths closed around the past like knives."
Safiyah Sinclair is a wordsmith. I initially picked this up because I have a general interest in texts inspired by Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', and was floored by Sinclair's prose and storytelling.
Safiyah Sinclair is a wordsmith. I initially picked this up because I have a general interest in texts inspired by Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', and was floored by Sinclair's prose and storytelling.
August 8, 2025
Sealey Challenge 2025: 7/31
Cannibal is threaded with excerpts from The Tempest, an intriguing device that creates a thematic through-line and links the poems together. Additionally, its title and main purpose is to deconstruct colonial ideas of Caribbean communities through reclaiming and deconstructing language - which I typically find very interesting to read about. Despite this, I struggled with the collection as a whole. There are undeniably some beautiful phrases, striking images, and memorable lines, but much of the work feels incohesive, leaving me without a clear anchor as a reader.
This is a dense read, and the poet’s image-rich, non-conceptual style, while deliberate in its fragmentation, often made it difficult to grasp what she was actually addressing. This was particularly more difficult during the most personal poems where it felt like I was constantly trying to decode what was being explored. Sinclair’s lyrical language sometimes becomes so saturated with metaphor that it distances rather than draws me into the emotional register she’s aiming for. While I can appreciate the craft, the density and abstraction left me feeling more like an observer than a participant in the experience she was trying to convey.
That said, the second section was pretty impactful for me; the poems there felt less abstract and more emotionally accessible. There are some real gems in this section that made me question why I was struggling so much with the other sections because I really enjoyed the poetic forms and voice which felt most clear and vivid there. Overall, I'm not sure that this poetry style is necessarily for me.
Cannibal is threaded with excerpts from The Tempest, an intriguing device that creates a thematic through-line and links the poems together. Additionally, its title and main purpose is to deconstruct colonial ideas of Caribbean communities through reclaiming and deconstructing language - which I typically find very interesting to read about. Despite this, I struggled with the collection as a whole. There are undeniably some beautiful phrases, striking images, and memorable lines, but much of the work feels incohesive, leaving me without a clear anchor as a reader.
This is a dense read, and the poet’s image-rich, non-conceptual style, while deliberate in its fragmentation, often made it difficult to grasp what she was actually addressing. This was particularly more difficult during the most personal poems where it felt like I was constantly trying to decode what was being explored. Sinclair’s lyrical language sometimes becomes so saturated with metaphor that it distances rather than draws me into the emotional register she’s aiming for. While I can appreciate the craft, the density and abstraction left me feeling more like an observer than a participant in the experience she was trying to convey.
That said, the second section was pretty impactful for me; the poems there felt less abstract and more emotionally accessible. There are some real gems in this section that made me question why I was struggling so much with the other sections because I really enjoyed the poetic forms and voice which felt most clear and vivid there. Overall, I'm not sure that this poetry style is necessarily for me.
May 19, 2023
It did take me a long time to finish this one but I am so glad that I read it.
This entrancing collection feeds on Safiya's childhood in Jamaica but also explores race relations and blackness in America. This lyrical collection paints a vivid imagery of how cannibalistic the world is to certain groups, from the female body, to motherhood and commitment to family and country.
Some poems are so dark and shocking that I was left reeling but they definitely hit their mark. It tables exiles, death and religion is such a provocative and enthralling way, a good example is in the poem "prayer book for vanishing". I absolutely loved this collection and I cannot wait to read something else by Safiya Sinclair.
Some of my favourite poems are "After the last astronauts had left us, I", "America the beautiful", "White Apocrypha", "Prayer book for vanishing", "Good hair", "A separation", and "spectre"
"I wear your undoing like a mask.
wear your porcelain pock of dust
across my forehead
as one of the damned.
....
But Lord I think
my angels do not hear. Lord,
they are tourist gawking through
the cages of my poverty,
who take pity in this squalor
then return to far moons."
This entrancing collection feeds on Safiya's childhood in Jamaica but also explores race relations and blackness in America. This lyrical collection paints a vivid imagery of how cannibalistic the world is to certain groups, from the female body, to motherhood and commitment to family and country.
Some poems are so dark and shocking that I was left reeling but they definitely hit their mark. It tables exiles, death and religion is such a provocative and enthralling way, a good example is in the poem "prayer book for vanishing". I absolutely loved this collection and I cannot wait to read something else by Safiya Sinclair.
Some of my favourite poems are "After the last astronauts had left us, I", "America the beautiful", "White Apocrypha", "Prayer book for vanishing", "Good hair", "A separation", and "spectre"
"I wear your undoing like a mask.
wear your porcelain pock of dust
across my forehead
as one of the damned.
....
But Lord I think
my angels do not hear. Lord,
they are tourist gawking through
the cages of my poverty,
who take pity in this squalor
then return to far moons."
October 16, 2021
"When I was a child
I counted the looper moths
caught in the dusty mesh
of our window screens.
Fed them slowly into the hot mouth
of a kerosene lamp, then watched
them pop and blacken soundlessly,
but could not look away.
I had known what it was to be nothing.
Bore the shamed blood-letter of my sex
like a banishment; wore the bruisemark
of my father's hands to school in silence.
And here I am, still at the old window
dying of thirst, watching my girlself asleep
with the candle flame alive in my car,
little sister yelling fire!"
// Autobiography
In the collection, Sinclair asks: "But how many ways can we reinvent violence?" It's an augury of defiance, brimming with rage, livid and outspoken as it talks back. As a diaspora Jamaican living in America, Sinclair inhabits an intersection of Black history. Highlighting vulnerability but not at cost of power and self-assertion, she states: "I am the wild diviner unparting / miracles this morning; may all your deeds / burn to nothing in my mouth." These poems rise to the challenge, quick to question the narrative and confront the status quo.
It is fascinating to see how Sinclair employs The Tempest, my favourite Shakespearean comedy, and how it is put in a conversation with Caribbean history. The body, its renewal and regeneration through self-consumption; she is Eve and Caliban both. Sinclair's verses are hypnotic, using arresting imagery as she cajoles and coaxes, demands and directs, all the while: "... Dream to wake up one morning / and learn there will be an early Spring." She says, "this is all of us".
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
I counted the looper moths
caught in the dusty mesh
of our window screens.
Fed them slowly into the hot mouth
of a kerosene lamp, then watched
them pop and blacken soundlessly,
but could not look away.
I had known what it was to be nothing.
Bore the shamed blood-letter of my sex
like a banishment; wore the bruisemark
of my father's hands to school in silence.
And here I am, still at the old window
dying of thirst, watching my girlself asleep
with the candle flame alive in my car,
little sister yelling fire!"
// Autobiography
In the collection, Sinclair asks: "But how many ways can we reinvent violence?" It's an augury of defiance, brimming with rage, livid and outspoken as it talks back. As a diaspora Jamaican living in America, Sinclair inhabits an intersection of Black history. Highlighting vulnerability but not at cost of power and self-assertion, she states: "I am the wild diviner unparting / miracles this morning; may all your deeds / burn to nothing in my mouth." These poems rise to the challenge, quick to question the narrative and confront the status quo.
It is fascinating to see how Sinclair employs The Tempest, my favourite Shakespearean comedy, and how it is put in a conversation with Caribbean history. The body, its renewal and regeneration through self-consumption; she is Eve and Caliban both. Sinclair's verses are hypnotic, using arresting imagery as she cajoles and coaxes, demands and directs, all the while: "... Dream to wake up one morning / and learn there will be an early Spring." She says, "this is all of us".
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
March 15, 2025
If you love poetry, then read this book before you read Sinclair's memoir, How To Say Babylon.
I think this work shows the brilliance of Safiya Sinclair as a creative writer, and it gives us insight into her life, her upbringing in the Caribbean, and her experiences as an adult in a racist and misogynist America and world. She cleverly hits at the issues with such powerful rebuke, that you are often left re-reading lines, and going back to previous poems, as you make the connection between the parts of this collection. In 'America the Beautiful', which instantly reminded me of Geoffrey Philps' America 2020', Sinclair lays bare America's race and violence problem with no ambiguity. Sinclair posits "But every night in America my brother is a criminal./ Gunned down for his clothes when he is not being shunned/ for the shadow of his face."
In my view, these poems are autobiographical and I particularly enjoyed 'Family Portrait' and 'Autobiography', and they harmonised with the collection's theme of identity and confronting generational and familial love or lack of love. Sinclair teaches us that even when "we sit silent in the face of our questions, a crown of mosquitos swarming our heads", we could still love the people around us, imperfect as that love may be.
Cannibal also shows the Sinclair's (and the Caribbean's) connection to the ocean. The dependence on it for sustenance, but also the centuries of pain associated with it.
This collection reminds me of why I love poetry. Read this collection!
I think this work shows the brilliance of Safiya Sinclair as a creative writer, and it gives us insight into her life, her upbringing in the Caribbean, and her experiences as an adult in a racist and misogynist America and world. She cleverly hits at the issues with such powerful rebuke, that you are often left re-reading lines, and going back to previous poems, as you make the connection between the parts of this collection. In 'America the Beautiful', which instantly reminded me of Geoffrey Philps' America 2020', Sinclair lays bare America's race and violence problem with no ambiguity. Sinclair posits "But every night in America my brother is a criminal./ Gunned down for his clothes when he is not being shunned/ for the shadow of his face."
In my view, these poems are autobiographical and I particularly enjoyed 'Family Portrait' and 'Autobiography', and they harmonised with the collection's theme of identity and confronting generational and familial love or lack of love. Sinclair teaches us that even when "we sit silent in the face of our questions, a crown of mosquitos swarming our heads", we could still love the people around us, imperfect as that love may be.
Cannibal also shows the Sinclair's (and the Caribbean's) connection to the ocean. The dependence on it for sustenance, but also the centuries of pain associated with it.
This collection reminds me of why I love poetry. Read this collection!
September 20, 2025
Hello Jamaica!!
My read around the world journey is in early days, but I decided to include a few poetry collections and this is one of them.
This was dark and beautiful and so creative. It’s dense and takes some working through but the payoff is immense. I always find it hard to articulate why I like certain collections and don’t like others as poetry feels so subjective and personal, but this one was a winner for me.
Ugh the entirety of section 3 was just “oh,” “wow,” “omg’s.”
Adding some of her other work to my tbr.
My read around the world journey is in early days, but I decided to include a few poetry collections and this is one of them.
This was dark and beautiful and so creative. It’s dense and takes some working through but the payoff is immense. I always find it hard to articulate why I like certain collections and don’t like others as poetry feels so subjective and personal, but this one was a winner for me.
Ugh the entirety of section 3 was just “oh,” “wow,” “omg’s.”
Adding some of her other work to my tbr.
June 23, 2020
Full of rage, beautiful language, sex, history, and ferocious self examination.
August 13, 2025
breathtaking
obviously cannibal predates how to say babylon, but reading the memoir first illuminates so many of these pieces so beautifully, it’s just spectacular
obviously cannibal predates how to say babylon, but reading the memoir first illuminates so many of these pieces so beautifully, it’s just spectacular
February 1, 2021
Beautiful and powerful turn of phrases. Works that are really impactful, the highlights for me were Catacombs, Family Portrait, Good Hair and Centre of the World. The images were rich and the language powerful but the fragmented writing is difficult for me to connect to. I'm trying to find any audio of her reading them. I find this style of poetry sits better via audio than visual. Read for #Blackathon Feb 2021.
September 9, 2016
"Tell the hounds who undress
me with their eyes — I have nothing
to hide."
— Safiya Sinclair, Center of the World
such a stunning and powerful debut! definitely need to re-read this beauty over and over and can't wait to read more in the future
me with their eyes — I have nothing
to hide."
— Safiya Sinclair, Center of the World
such a stunning and powerful debut! definitely need to re-read this beauty over and over and can't wait to read more in the future
May 22, 2020
Dense, rich, complicated poetry. As someone who doesn’t love poetry, I enjoyed piecing through these slowly. Approaching this from a post colonial or feminist lens is particularly full of meaning, and I doubt I have begun to scratch the surface of some of these very intense poems.
October 3, 2016
I love this book so much I recommended it for Philadelphia Printworks Reading Series: https://www.philadelphiaprintworks.co...
February 27, 2019
A collection that felt like it was birthed from our Jamaican traditional poetry form, dipped and crushed in the world of being a black woman, and smoothed over with introspective snark & brilliance.
December 8, 2020
This year I've really got into poetry. I think there is so much to be learnt from poets, their experiences and the way they document them.
Cannibal is a fine example of this.
The poetry Safiya Sinclair writes is hypnotic, fierce and highly important.
Poems about race in America, what it means to be a black woman and of course her home country Jamaica are all covered in this thoughtful and timely collection.
Although Safiya's work has a density to it that requires your full attention each poem had me mesmerised.
The depth and emotion really pulled me in. There's a rawness to the writing, its bodily and some are actually quite disturbing but its equally as passionate and compelling.
I loved that you feel as if you get to know the poet in this collection. It feels deeply personal and I was often really moved reading this gem of a book.
If poetry is your jam or even if its not I highly recommend this one! I personally am excited to see what Safiya Sinclair writes next.
Cannibal is a fine example of this.
The poetry Safiya Sinclair writes is hypnotic, fierce and highly important.
Poems about race in America, what it means to be a black woman and of course her home country Jamaica are all covered in this thoughtful and timely collection.
Although Safiya's work has a density to it that requires your full attention each poem had me mesmerised.
The depth and emotion really pulled me in. There's a rawness to the writing, its bodily and some are actually quite disturbing but its equally as passionate and compelling.
I loved that you feel as if you get to know the poet in this collection. It feels deeply personal and I was often really moved reading this gem of a book.
If poetry is your jam or even if its not I highly recommend this one! I personally am excited to see what Safiya Sinclair writes next.
November 24, 2017
Little Red Plum Crisis in the night. My heart a little red plum in my mouth. Glowing its small fire in the dark. How you, hand on my breast, open my little animal cage to watch me burn, eyes marvelling at the birds that rush out. My voice rising red balloons in the air. My hands find a bright cardinal bleeding through your shirt, my name spreading softly on your tongue. Swift cherry vine galloping, stitching warm skin to skin. I reach for you, reach into the feathers of the dark, wanting to stay here, wanting to press each hour into vellum so tomorrow I may search and find our little blossom still unfurling there. I slip slowly into your light, kiss my red plum into your mouth. Here. I give you all of me in this little pink cup: hot mouthfuls of fevergrass, of wild Jamaican mint. Here, in the shadow of this hothouse room, a red hibiscus blooms and blooms.
July 23, 2022
Reading Cannibal is like to being dragged through the sea by your ankles while a goddess reads you Shakespeare. A lot of it I didn't quite understand, some of it made me understand things perhaps I didn't quite understand before, all of it was densely gorgeous and left me reeling. Constantly returning to the ocean (which I agree is poetic as fuck), everything seems warped and and hazy as though viewed underwater, with a mangled Caliban figure greeting you at every turn, this is not a collection I am likely to forget any time soon.
Daughter entering this world a host. Father your bleached animal,
your lamentations in the sand. Mother her red bones come knocking.
Mother her red bones come knocking at the floorboards,
my mother knock-knocking at his skull where he dreams.
Scratching at your door, my dry rattle of Morse code:
Father Let me in. With the mash-mouth spirits who enter us,
father the split fibula where the marrow must rust—
Father the soft drum in my ear. Daughter unweeding
her familiar mischief. Mother jangling the ribcage: I am here.
*
Home some brute sojourn
we wracked unspeakable, we mute vernacular
smashed nuclear sun and this code-switch.
All night the world bled on my fang
like a language and we unsmiling
our narrow gape
our space unslanging,
And all of us a zero.
*
Woke ravenous. Woke with a mollusk mind
and swallowed all, you who skulked through
the hull of me
and glowering. Glorious dead, I am inhabiting—
Sat in your feral sun
mouth wide
and purred with wonder, Hunger,
small hands
devouring.
*
Heart—
long fogged with thunder,
let us spit fire through our teeth.
Let the long winter find us
sucking on charcoal, orphans
barking at a moon burnt out.
Let us be swept in the ear of an unquiet
morning, and remember the home
we have built for ourselves.
Daughter entering this world a host. Father your bleached animal,
your lamentations in the sand. Mother her red bones come knocking.
Mother her red bones come knocking at the floorboards,
my mother knock-knocking at his skull where he dreams.
Scratching at your door, my dry rattle of Morse code:
Father Let me in. With the mash-mouth spirits who enter us,
father the split fibula where the marrow must rust—
Father the soft drum in my ear. Daughter unweeding
her familiar mischief. Mother jangling the ribcage: I am here.
*
Home some brute sojourn
we wracked unspeakable, we mute vernacular
smashed nuclear sun and this code-switch.
All night the world bled on my fang
like a language and we unsmiling
our narrow gape
our space unslanging,
And all of us a zero.
*
Woke ravenous. Woke with a mollusk mind
and swallowed all, you who skulked through
the hull of me
and glowering. Glorious dead, I am inhabiting—
Sat in your feral sun
mouth wide
and purred with wonder, Hunger,
small hands
devouring.
*
Heart—
long fogged with thunder,
let us spit fire through our teeth.
Let the long winter find us
sucking on charcoal, orphans
barking at a moon burnt out.
Let us be swept in the ear of an unquiet
morning, and remember the home
we have built for ourselves.
February 26, 2018
The author grew up in a Rastafarian family, which possessed few books but a dictionary. So she read that, a feat this poetry collection underscores with its beautiful language.
It parallels in various ways Shakespeare's The Tempest, particularly with that play's Caliban character, and dives into the Americana of Thomas Jefferson at The University of Virginia. Other poems remember biographical experiences. With the multicultural perspective of a Jamaican-American, she speaks up to make readers aware of factual history rather than the imperiousness which continues to underplay the contributions of slaves and natives and which tries to wipe her language of origin out. These poems remain interesting again and again.
It parallels in various ways Shakespeare's The Tempest, particularly with that play's Caliban character, and dives into the Americana of Thomas Jefferson at The University of Virginia. Other poems remember biographical experiences. With the multicultural perspective of a Jamaican-American, she speaks up to make readers aware of factual history rather than the imperiousness which continues to underplay the contributions of slaves and natives and which tries to wipe her language of origin out. These poems remain interesting again and again.
November 24, 2022
This was an interesting and unique collection. A lot of beautiful and inventive language, but many of the poems I did not really understand.
.
My favorites:
-"Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda"
-"Mermaid"
-"Catacombs"
-"Autobiography"
-"Notes on the State of Virginia, I"
-"America the Beautiful"
-"Another White Christmas in Virginia"
-"One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, I"
-"White Apocrypha"
-"Notes on the State of Virginia, IV"
-"Elocution Lessons with Ms. Silverstone"
-"Notes on the State of Virginia, V"
-"Good Hair"
-"How to Be a More Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess"
-"Crania Americana"
.
My favorites:
-"Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda"
-"Mermaid"
-"Catacombs"
-"Autobiography"
-"Notes on the State of Virginia, I"
-"America the Beautiful"
-"Another White Christmas in Virginia"
-"One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, I"
-"White Apocrypha"
-"Notes on the State of Virginia, IV"
-"Elocution Lessons with Ms. Silverstone"
-"Notes on the State of Virginia, V"
-"Good Hair"
-"How to Be a More Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess"
-"Crania Americana"
March 11, 2022
Safiya's brain is f*cked up talented, strings together so many visuals in each poem that reading this feels like eating a rich meal.
This collection focuses a lot on her own ties to her family's home in Jamaica, her childhood, and race issues. (Honestly the synapsis on the back is spot on if you're considering reading this, so would recommend you check that out if you're interested potentially)
This collection focuses a lot on her own ties to her family's home in Jamaica, her childhood, and race issues. (Honestly the synapsis on the back is spot on if you're considering reading this, so would recommend you check that out if you're interested potentially)
March 4, 2024
4.5
>> Pocomania
>> Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda
>> I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess
>> Prayer Book for Vanishing
>> How to Be a More Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess
>> Center of the World
>> The Art of Unselfing
>> Pocomania
>> Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda
>> I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess
>> Prayer Book for Vanishing
>> How to Be a More Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess
>> Center of the World
>> The Art of Unselfing
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March 11, 2024Some of the poems I’ve really enjoyed and she used very beautiful and ornate language. I’ll probably visit this in a few years, once I have more poetry under my belt. Really loved how this tied to The Tempest.
April 21, 2025
The language is so masterful. Her imagery is both chilling and stunning. Reading her memoir before helped me understand the meaning in a lot of her poems.
It was really hard to understand most of the poems. I need more practice at reading poetry.
It was really hard to understand most of the poems. I need more practice at reading poetry.
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