Cannibal - (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) by Safiya Sinclair (Paperback)

About the Book

"Framed by "The Tempest" and calling on historical, cultural, and biological sources, "Cannibal" is a provocative poetic exploration of the female body, identity, and race"--

Book Synopsis

Colliding 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.

Review Quotes

"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, author of Roll Deep-- (2/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Reading (and rereading) Sinclair is an urgently necessary, absolutely unparalleled experience."--Diego Báez, Booklist starred review-- (9/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Safiya Sinclair writes strange, mythological, gorgeously elaborate lyric poems, with a diction that is both arcane and contemporary. . . . Her language is distinctive, assured, and a marvel to read."--Cathy Park Hong, from her introduction to Safiya Sinclair in the Boston Review
-- (2/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Stunning debut collection"--Publishers Weekly starred review

"This award-winning collection comes to eat you."--Waxwing Literary Journal

"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, author of Bright Dead Things
-- (2/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.