Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s poems inhabit a world of permeable barriers and transformations between men and women, humans and animals, the hunters and the hunted and the living and the dead. Her collection creates vivid images of the rural Trinidadian world, where she grew up and still lives. This is a world where the real and the mythical rub shoulders, where people know about the magical properties of plants, where anything can happen, where “everything that breathes will howl”. What emerges from her vivid word-pictures are images of the complexity of family ties, of motherhood that is both tender and fearsome, of an intimacy with the natural world which is torn between fears for its fragility and hopes for its resilience. In the words of Shivanee Ramlochan, “Boodoo-Fortuné’s lines are primed for simplicity and brutality alike… of the promises stirring within buried bones… and all manner of unknowable, mysterious selves.”

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné won the 2016 Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Poetry category. Here's how winning the prize has impacted her and her writing career. https://t.co/lsRk55ZOHL?amp=1