Cannibal (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Sinclair, Safiya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803290632 ISBN 13: 9780803290631

Verlag: UNIV OF NEBRASKA PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

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. 
 

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Safiya 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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Cannibal

By Safiya Sinclair

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-9063-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, viii, 
I., 
Home, 3, 
Pocomania, 5, 
In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing, 6, 
Fisherman's Daughter, 8, 
Hands, 10, 
Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda, 12, 
Mermaid, 14, 
Catacombs, 15, 
Dreaming in Foreign, 17, 
Family Portrait, 19, 
I Shall Account Myself a Happy Creaturess, 21, 
Autobiography, 23, 
Osteology, 24, 
After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, I, 27, 
II., 
Notes on the State of Virginia, I, 31, 
America the Beautiful, 32, 
Another White Christmas in Virginia, 34, 
One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, I, 36, 
One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, II, 38, 
One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, III, 40, 
Notes on the State of Virginia, II, 42, 
White Apocrypha, 43, 
Notes on the State of Virginia, III, 45, 
Notes on the State of Virginia, IV, 46, 
Elocution Lessons with Ms. Silverstone, 47, 
Litany for Charlottesville, 51, 
Notes on the State of Virginia, V, 53, 
III., 
Prayer Book for Vanishing, 57, 
Confessor, 60, 
Omen, 62, 
Good Hair, 64, 
Woman, Wound, 66, 
Woman, 26, Remains Optimistic as Body Turns to Stone, 68, 
How to Be an Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess, 70, 
Birthmark, or Purifying at the Sink, 72, 
Little Red Plum, 74, 
Center of the World, 75, 
IV., 
After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, II (Laika), 79, 
Spectre, 81, 
Chimera, 84, 
How to Excise a Tumor, 86, 
Incorrigible, 87, 
August Ghost, 89, 
A Separation, 91, 
In the Event of the Last Unhappiness, Return to the Sea, 93, 
August in the Country of Another, 95, 
Kingdom-come, 96, 
The Art of Unselfing, 99, 
Doubt, 101, 
V., 
Crania Americana, 107, 
Notes, 110, 

CHAPTER 1

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices.

CALIBAN, The Tempest

The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.

KAMAU BRATHWAITE, History of the Voice

    HOME

    Have I forgotten it —
    wild conch-shell dialect,

    black apostrophe curled
    tight on my tongue?

    Or how the Spanish built walls
    of broken glass to keep me out

    but the Doctor Bird kept chasing
    and raking me in: This place

    is your place, wreathed in red
    Sargassum, ancient driftwood

    nursed on the pensive sea.
    The ramshackle altar I visited

    often, packed full with fish-skull,
    bright with lignum vitae plumes:

    Father, I have asked so many miracles
    of it. To be patient and forgiving,

    to be remade for you in some
    small wonder. And what a joy

    to still believe in anything.
    My diction now as straight

    as my hair; that stranger we've
    long stopped searching for.

    But if somehow our half-sunken
    hearts could answer, I would cup

    my mouth in warm bowls
    over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt

    of home, taste Bogue-mud
    and one long orange peel for skin.

    I'd open my ear for sugar cane
    and long stalks of gungo peas

    to climb in. I'd swim the sea
    still lapsing in a soldered frame,

    the sea that again and again
    calls out my name.


    POCOMANIA

    Father unbending father unbroken father
    with the lowhanging belly, father I was cleaved from,
    pressed into, cast and remolded, father I was forged
    in the fire of your self. Ripped my veined skin, one eyelid,
    father my black tangle of hair and teeth. Born yellowed
    and wrinkled, father your jackfruit, foster my overripe flesh.
    Father your first daughter now severed at the ankles, father
    your black machete. I remember your slick smell, your sea-dark,
    your rum-froth, wailed and smeared my wet jelly across
    your cheek. Father forgive my impossible demands. I conjure you
    in woven tam, Lion of Judah, Father your red, gold,
    and green. Father a flag I am waving / father a flag I am burning.
    Father skittering in on a boat of whale skeleton,
    his body wrapped in white like an Orthodox
    and his nest of acolyte women, his beard-comber, his Primrose,
    his Dahlia, his Nagasaki blossom. Mother and I were none of them.
    Father washing me in eucalyptus, in garlic, in goldenseal.
    Fathering my exorcism. Father the harsh brine of my sea.
    Making sounds only the heart can feel. Father a burrowing
    insect, his small incision. No bleat but a warm gurgle —
    Daughter entering this world a host. Father your beached 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 when 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.


    IN CHILDHOOD, CERTAIN SKIES
    REFINED MY SEEING

    Sunset. That blood-orange hymn
    combusting the year, nautilus chamber

    of youth's obscurities, your empty room
    for psalms, lost rituals. There find the bittersweetness

    of one's unknown body, heliotropic:
    Welcome, stranger of myself.

    Consider the Jumbie bird clanging its deathshriek
    like a gong,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF NEBRASKA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0803290632
• ISBN 13: 9780803290631
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 126
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar