Cannibal (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award Winner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & LettersWinner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Poetry)An American Library Association "Notable Book of the Year" Finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Open Book AwardLonglisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize One of BuzzFeed's Best Poetry Books of 2016One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2016"A Publishers Weekly "Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2016"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.