'an act of imaginative virtuosity'

In an act of imaginative virtuosity, Jamaican-born poet Shara McCallum wonders what might’ve been if poet Robert Burns, “arguably the most well-known Scot,” had left his Scottish home for Jamaica in 1786 [...] The poetry collection that rises out her ­what-if question, “No Ruined Stone,” [...] is arresting, lyrical, wrestling with colonialism, racism, and the knotted legacy of slavery. McCallum inserts herself into Burns; many of the poems are voiced from his perspective. “What in man yokes us to the past?” she asks, and writes of being “harrowed by the feeling of the damned.”