Cannibal

Locations
Call Number: 811.6 Si
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	811.6 Si	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Colliding with and confrontingThe Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems"-- Provided by publisher.
"Framed by "The Tempest" and calling on historical, cultural, and biological sources, "Cannibal" is a provocative poetic exploration of the female body, identity, and race"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Skillful submitted by redwood on August 6, 2023, 11:09am Safiya Sinclair’s debut is on the longer side for a collection, over 100 pages of poems, and none of them wasted. Sinclair’s lines are dense with figurative language and sonic beauty, anchored by an ever-shifting, compelling lyric speaker. Sinclair’s forms aren’t experimental, and yet I find myself constantly admiring her form, her use of tercets and dropped lines in particular.

A partial list of writers this is in conversation with: William Shakespeare, Aime Cesaire, Evie Shockley, Robin Coste Lewis, Terrance Hayes, A. Van Jordan.

In a prefatory note, Sinclair writes of the linguistic links between “cannibal” and “Caribbean,” establishing a series of racist and colonial slippages as context for the entire collection. Shakespeare’s Caliban follows the same root, and Sinclair’s perfectly selected epigraphs come from The Tempest and Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempete. The poems blend Caribbean history with African American history, riffing on The Souls of Black Folk and Notes on the State of Virginia. Jamaica’s rich flora and fauna drip from the poems, Poinciana trees to inspired ocean images. The core of everything is bodies, both subjective experience of them and rhetorical figurations. One of my favorite poems is called “Hands.”

This feels like a collection I could read infinitely many times and still find something new on each read