Synopsis
A beautiful debut collection from Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair that draws on our colonial history and speaks powerfully to our present moment.
Shortlisted for Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021
A Guardian most anticipated book for 2020
'Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection' – Scotsman
Colliding with and confronting Shakespeare's The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the...
Details
01 October 2020
128 pages
9781529030235
Imprint: Picador
Reviews
With exquisite lyrical precision, Safiya Sinclair is offering us a new muscular music that is as brutal as it is beautiful. Intelligent and elemental, these poems mark the debut of a poet who is dangerously talented and desperately needed.Ada Limón
Cannibal is nothing less than an entrancing debut that reveals the teeming intellect and ravishing lucidity of a young poet in full possession of her literary powers. Here is a poetry that richly interrogates power and history while also eloquently and furtively asserting the possibilities of nature, desire, and the body as ceremonial and spiritual sources of resistance and affirmation.Major Jackson
Book of the Month: A singingly gifted writer . . . Sinclair riffs on this notion of savagery as she evokes her childhood in Jamaica and explores race relations in the US; womanhood and otherness; post-colonialism and life in exile . . . An astonishing talent.The Bookseller
Covers so much ground: her Jamaican background, spirituality, womanhood, America, race relations. She laces words together in a beautiful tapestry, full of history, life, death and, most of all, renewal.Morgan Jerkins, New York Times