About this item
Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award Publishers Weekly Poetry Top 10 for Fall 2016Winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in PoetryColliding with and confronting The 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.
About the Author
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the Metcalf Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry, the 2017 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry, and selected as an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. Sinclair is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. Her other honours include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Cannibal was also longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Oxford American, the 2018 Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
