Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation.

In Jean D'Amérique's book-length poem, each page is as brief as a hurricane's eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic fláneur. His "body / a devastation inventory," his stroll a "walk / to curse the sidewalks," he peers into the ruins--left by the winds of colonialism, capitalism, war, and natural disaster--and sees a "crop of eyes" peering back. What others dismiss as broken, for D'Amérique, is a mirror in shards, "drinking up all the world's rot / then spilling it all out in diamantine rays." The first of his books to appear in English, this work reclaims the visceral potency of poetry--it is food, it is "collars of blood," it is a garment sewn with "a thread of sobs."

Poetry. Caribbean Studies.