The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader--serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.


Author: Kwame Dawes
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 08/20/2024
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.60w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781324076315


Review Citation(s): 
Library Journal 05/01/2024 pg. 100
Publishers Weekly 05/20/2024