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All the awardees, all of us,
acknowledge and respect
the legacy of predecessors;
and all of us
Not knowing if there will be tomorrow
for us, I open my eyes knowing,
from somewhere, you’ll be there
fussing over breakfast or
greasing your son’s unruly hair—
More than in some mirror’s bold embrace
You bring me back to years blotted from old, discarded
calendars. Everything fitted into prescribed slots
Christmas menus jam-packed with ham and pork recipes.
You enter scripts, rearrange plots, love and pain, my twin
Your thirty-seventh year comes at a strange juncture
though unprepared, I expected it to happen
without change as the years kept piling on.
Stripped of candlelight,
perfumes, and
other sweet-smelling things,
A Short Story from the Archives:
Vol. 8, No. 32, Pages 229–233 (January–June 1961)
I never saw a gun firsthand until I was a teenager. It was unexpected. Guns always would be in a country without regular recreational usage.
When you come from a place where the sun is always shining, no one expects you to be familiar with cold darkness. All you know is unrelenting yellow pouring over the sloping hills and punishing heat that cooks the gleaming marl-rubble streets beside your wooden house.
A Word on Caribbean Aesthetics from the Archives:
Vol. 17, No. 66 & 67, Pages 101–109 (June 1983)
An Essay from the Archives:
Vol. 16, No. 64 Pages 241–257 (December 1978)
for Gilberte O’Sullivan, in memoriam
John Wickham’s “Letter from Ferney”, “Notes from New York”, “Dutch Excursion”, and “Letter from Geneva” form an epistolary “mailbox” of work from a Caribbean man of letters writing from abroad on places, faces and things from a way of seeing whose narrative “mode” can best be described as
A Word on Criticism from the Archives:
Vol. 14, No. 56, Pages 227–232 (January–June 1973)
Lost and Found: An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean, written and edited by Alison Donnell, with contributions by Chris Campbell, Ronald Cummings Marta Fernández Campa, Joanne C Hillhouse, Aeron MacHattie, Winsome Minott, Nalini Mohabir, Evelyn O’Calla
Season of Mist: Vendettas Bittersweet by Mac Donald Dixon. Vero Beach: Strategic Book Publishing, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948858106. 272 pp. Paperback.
The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781487011932. 344 pp. Paperback.
A Word of Refutation from the Archives:
Vol. 19, No. 73, Pages 29–31 (June 1990)
it may have been somewhere in the look, clear
and just quickening the breath, deep
like the billowing of the hurricane’s winds, hot
like the dance of a first lust, damp
with the cling of that thin film of sweat