With a generous sample from each poet, there are new writers from Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia, St Vincent and Guyana. Meet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune and her richly gothic take on love and its complications; Danielle Jennings’ exuberant narratives of family history and the struggles for respect between men and women; Ruel Johnson’s often witty attempts to confront the insanity of contemporary Guyana’s race wars and political corruption through the formal coolness of poetry; Monica Minott’s frank celebrations of women’s sexuality and her attempt to re-enter the world of spirit possession and trance; Debra Providence’s spare womanist reflections that pack a more devastating punch by saying more with less; Shivanee Ramlochan’s confidently experimental poems that explore the threatening uncertainties of the present through the imagery of speculative fictions set in some post-disaster world; Colin Robinson’s polyphonic, modernist reflections on the queer Caribbean and its joys and sorrows; and Sassy Ross’s tightly structured explorations of memory between the here and there of St Lucia and New York.
Here is a generation that has absorbed Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter and Lorna Goodison, but has found its own distinctive voices, themes and formal models. Each of the contributors is well on the way to having their own first collections.
Coming Up Hot is the second publication of Peekash Press, a joint imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, as part of CaribLit project.