Kamau Brathwaite

In DS (2)—Dreamstories 2—Kamau Brathwaite continues his ongoing collection of prose poems, comprised of the broken images, flow, and half-told stories of dreams. The poetic stories in DS (2) use Brathwaite’s trademark sycorax video style, offering personal revelations mixed with political and historical fables occurring around the globe. Brathwaite’s prose poems relate with ardency and pathos the Caribbean experience and are a potent voice of the African diaspora. Nathaniel Mackey wrote: “Kamau Brathwaite’s ’calibanic play’ reveals a fiendish delight in the slippage to which words are prone.…

Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite’s long unavailable, landmark trilogy––Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987)––now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its “Video Sycorax” typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the “intercovery”) of Brathwaite’s African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession.…

Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich, arid, beautiful collection, Black + Blues is cast in three parts — “Fragments," “Drought,” and “Flowers.” In Brathwaite’s voice, as The Beloit Poetry Journal noted, “the false distinctions between poetry and polemic, between tragic vision and comic insight, between anger and tenderness, here disappear.…

Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry offers stunning collages devoted to the history, mythology, and language of the African diaspora, and has gained him a world reputation. Middle Passages, his most recent collection, is his sixteenth poetry volume, but his first with an American publisher. With notes of protest and lament, the fourteen poems of Middle Passages address the effects of the Middle Passage of slavery on the New World, and celebrate great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith), poets, heroes of the resistance, and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Nelson Mandela.…