This is a profound and powerful collection, disturbing sometimes, as it is meant to be, but also satisfying in the considered shape of the poems and the vigour and beauty of their expression. Its subject, signalled in the puns of the title, is the puzzle of what it means to live with the thought that death is the only certainty. Its focus is the body, a Black woman’s body challenged from within by the threatened mutiny of its cells, and from without by the inherited traumas of the ‘whip-taint’ of history and its assault on the enslaved Black body, and by a violent, colourist society still shaped by that history, and by the particular complications of family and personal history in which misogynistic men became the mirror of self-appraisal. 

It is also a collection about resistance and healing. Of finding a self that fights back through self-knowledge, the cultivation of a cutting humour, and even, sometimes, the revengeful spirit of the goddess Kali. It’s about how healing comes through love and care, and in openness to the natural world. For even in a Jamaica beset with upsurgent crime and hurricane and caught between the toxic and violently sexist language of the dancehall star and the preacher’s stern call to Repent!, there are the times when the abundance of nature calls for grateful thanks, and the bonds of friendship remind that ‘life still sweet, life still nice.’