Peepal Tree Salon: Tiphanie Yanique and Malika Booker at Waterstones, Piccadilly Circus

Monday 19 September, 7-9pm
Waterstones Piccadilly Circus, 203 - 206 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HD
FREE

Ahead of the Forward Prize ceremony later this month, shortlisted poet Tiphanie Yanique visits the UK for a rare appearance in support of her collection Wife. Tiphanie joins local poet Malika Booker for an intimate evening of poetry and readings. Both poets, who are at the forefront of their craft, will be introduced by Jeremy Poynting, Managing Editor of Peepal Tree Press, the home of the best in Caribbean and Black British writing.

About the authors

Tiphanie Yanique, was born in the Virgin Islands, She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes' Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Her collection Wife was winner of the 2016 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize. Her writing has won numerous awards including the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, the 2011 Bocas Prize for Fiction, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and many other places.

Malika Booker is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas 2014 poetry prize, and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She received her MA from Goldsmiths University and was recently awarded the Cultural Fellowship in Creative Writing/Literary Art post at Leeds University. Malika was the inaugural Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and has also written for the stage and radio.

About the books

The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Poems that are cutting about male self-deceptions and arrogations of power speak to poems that display a deep sensitivity to the aloneness of the embattled male psyche. This is not verse in the confessional mode, but poems that take on other voices, other histories and explore the relationship between experiences and the way we mythologise them. These spare, elegant poems are not only intensely body focused and attentive to the minutiae of domestic space, but that they make connections to the worlds of family, church, village and nation – and even, in a poem the references the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, to the soul. Their context is a Virgin Islands’ past, a Black American present, and an enlarged human future.

Malika Booker’s Pepper Seed is map and compass to a world of distinct yet interconnected landscapes. At home in a number of locales (Brooklyn, Brixton, Trinidad, Guyana, and Grenada) Booker trains a brave eye on the unspeakable and the unspoken. By turns bearing witness, to the interior lives of the characters that people her poems, and laying herself bare, conjuring an immediate and complex vision of the miraculous ordinary. Pepper Seed is a wind at the reader’s back. It tickles, whispers, prods and shouts as we are borne from one world to the next.

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