Cannibal

(Paperback)

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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 '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.' - Major Jackson Colliding with and confronting Shakespeare's The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal beautifully evoke the poet's Jamaican childhood and reach beyond to explore 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. Cannibal marks the arrival of a thrilling and essential new lyrical voice.

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 Limn
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
Filled with beautifully rich imagery . . . Lyrical and provocative, Sinclair's poems teach the reader in rich language what it means to be 'other' * Buzzfeed Books *
Much like June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Sinclair is a force to be reckoned with. Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed. * Lenny Letter *
Cannibal is the dazzling debut volume of Safiya Sinclair, born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and living in the U.S. Her poems shimmer with the rich colours and sounds of her homeland, but running through is a sense of escape and of exile. * Daily Mail *
Precise and provocative poems . . . Sinclair writes with a thrilling sensibility of the texture of savageness * New Statesman *
Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection . . . Sinclair's material interweaves the personal, the historical, and the political with language of stunning originality . . . these poems are physical, enraged and sensual but also reflected and precise. * Scotsman *

Author Bio

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers' Award, tthe OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair's other honours include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, 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. She is writing a memoir of chronicling her life growing up in Jamaica.