Blue Flare: Three Contemporary Haitian Poets: velyne Trouillot, Marie-Celie Agnant, Maggy de Coster

(Paperback, Bilingual edition)

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Three celebrated poets illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21^st century, particularly for women, in this exceptional and unprecedented trilingual collection. In velyne Trouillots sensual poems about love and yearning, she asks repeatedly in what language should I speak to you Marie-Clie Agnant addresses poverty, pain, death, but also the pleasures of passion. Maggy De Costers concise and personal poems explore the world its nature, light, wind and, sometimes, political themes. Together, these poems navigate between an impulse to capture gently these moments of light (De Coster) and the very different insistence that we see how pain sits at ground level / at times charging like a beast (Agnant). The original poems in French and Haitian Kreyl appear facing the English translations by Danielle Georges LeGros. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

Author Bio

velyne Trouillot lives in Port-au-Prince, where she is a professor of French at the Universit d'Etat d'Haiti. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two volumes of stories for children, two books of poems, and an award-winning play. She is a member of one of Haiti's most fertile intellectual and literary families, standing alongside her siblings: novelist Lyonel Trouillot; anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and Kreyl scholar and children's book author Jocelyne Trouillot. She, her daughter, and her brother Lyonel, founded Pr-Texte, a writer's organization that sponsors reading and writing workshops.Marie-Clie Agnant is a writer, translator, and activist whose novels have been widely-translated and include The Book of Emma (2004) which evokes the hardships endured by enslaved women in the Caribbean and the challenges to giving voice to this history today. Living in Montral and writing across literary genres, she has produced poetry, fiction, tales, and books for young readers. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes des terres brles (2016). Her critically-acclaimed work offers poignant refusals of silence. She worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre and regularly visits Vermont. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate (national poet laureate).

Maggy de Coster is a poet, essayist and anthologist who lives in Paris. She has worked as a journalist in Haiti, France, Switzerland, England and Barbados, and is the author of more than 20 books in a variety of literary and other genres. De Coster received the Jean-Cocteau Poetry Prize in 2004. She founded and directs the literary journal Manoir des Potes, and her poems have been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Arabic.
Translator Danielle Legros Georges is the author of Island Heart (2021), translations of the poems of Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert, among other titles. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and included in international artistic commissions and collaborations. In 2014, Legros Georges was named Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature, and a professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.