Part of him embraces the New World condition of being Brathwaite’s ‘poor harbourless spade’, but America has entered his psyche and his children are becoming Americans. Yet the thought of becoming an American citizen is too uncomfortable to contemplate. In a rich piece of writing that has the immediacy of a man thinking aloud and the careful structure of art, Dawes explores the experiences that bring him to this state of indecision. In the process, he writes about the things that matter to him as writer, husband, father and active citizen: place, race, nation, religion, childhood, family and parenthood, sex and death.

'A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock is a potent tale of immigration and exploration. I love that Kwame Dawes calls it a personal narrative rather than a memoir. Here, the present and the future matter as much as the past. Movement -- geographical, intellectual and spiritual -- is the ruling force. Dawes is Ghanaian by birth and Jamaican by upbringing. Life has taken him from England to Canada to the American South, with its fraught bloody past.' --Margo Jefferson

'A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock is a wonderful memoir but it is much more than that: a poet’s eloquent meditation on the complexities of history, race and the oft-broken promise of America.' -- Geoff Dyer

Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty books, and is widely recognized as one the Caribbean’s leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska.