Kamau Brathwaite

"In this book Kamau Brathwaite offers this first U.S. edition of his ongoing collection of prose poems, comprised of broken images, flow tidalectics, and the half-told stories of dreams."--BOOK JACKET.

"Kamau Brathwaite's newest work, Born to Slow Horses, is a series of poetic meditations on islands and exile, language and ritual, and the force of personal and historical passions and griefs. These poems are haunted, figuratively and literally, by spirits of the African diaspora and drenched in the colors, sounds, and rhythms of the islands. But they also encompass the world of the exile and return, and the events of 9/11 in New York City. Brathwaite is one of the foremost voices in postcolonial inquiry and expression, and his poetry is densely rooted and expansive." "Using his unusual "sycorax" signature typography and spelling, Brathwaite brings a cultural specificity into his pages, with distinct accents, sonic gestures, and pronunciations - making them new, exciting, and rich in nuances."--BOOK JACKET.

MiddlePassages is an offshoot of the author's second trilogy, 'a splice of time & space', as he puts it, between his/father's world of Sun Poem and 'the magical irrealism' of X/Self. With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, MiddlePassages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean & New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell - a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations. . And so MiddlePassages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolas Guillen, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.

Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich and beautiful collection, Black + Blues is cast in three parts - "Fragments," "Drought," and "Flowers."

"In its title, Strange Fruit refers to the song of a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday and to the malign persecution that drove Kamau Brathwaite from his New York home to resettlement in his native Barbados. But the title also points to the enigma of beauty created out of that experience of cultural lynching, in poems of urgency, elegance, wisdom and brave humour. ... It is a collection full of beauties of form, phrase and sound, such as in the poem “Sleep Widow” where instead of finding comfort, the poet and loved woman “bull-fight like lock-horm logga-head until the evening pools the grief along our edges/ and cools us to this peace”, the very sounds in the poem fighting their way towards resolution."--Back cover.