Jean D'Amérique
2022

Jean D'Amérique's book-length poem peers into the ruins--left by the winds of colonialism, capitalism, war, and natural disaster--and sees a "crop of eyes" peering back. In Jean D'Amérique's book-length poem, each page is as brief as a hurricane's eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic fl,neur. His "body / a devastation inventory," his stroll a "walk / to curse the sidewalks," he peers into the ruins--left by the winds of colonialism, capitalism, war, and natural disaster--and sees a "crop of eyes" peering back. What others dismiss as broken, for D'Amérique, is a mirror in shards, "drinking up all the world's rot / then spilling it all out in diamantine rays." The first of his books to appear in English, this work reclaims the visceral potency of poetry--it is food, it is "collars of blood," it is a garment sewn with "a thread of sobs." Poetry. Caribbean Studies.

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No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace