Coming up Hot: 8 New Caribbean Poets

Here is an opportunity to discover some of the best new, unpublished poets from the Caribbean. Coming Up Hot is the second publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.

With a generous sample from each poet, there are new writers from Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia, St Vincent and Guyana. Meet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune and her richly gothic take on love and its complications; Danielle Jennings exuberant narratives of family history and the struggles for respect between men and women; Ruel Johnsons often witty attempts to confront the insanity of contemporary Guyanas race wars and political corruption through the formal coolness of poetry; Monica Minotts frank celebrations of womens sexuality and her attempt to re-enter the world of spirit possession and trance; Debra Providences spare womanist reflections that pack a more devastating punch by saying more with less; Shivanee Ramlochans confidently experimental poems that explore the threatening uncertainties of the present through the imagery of speculative fictions set in some post-disaster world; Colin Robinsons polyphonic, modernist reflections on the queer Caribbean and its joys and sorrows; and Sassy Rosss tightly structured explorations of memory between the here and there of St Lucia and New York.

Here is a generation that has absorbed Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter and Lorna Goodison, but has found its own distinctive voices, themes and formal models. Each of the contributors is well on the way to having their own first collections.

Coming Up Hot is the second publication of Peekash Press, a joint imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, as part of CaribLit project.