Safiya Sinclair is a poet and librettist born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Award in Poetry, a 2017 American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her debut collection, Cannibal, was selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year," and 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 honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia and is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
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CannibalPoemsFrom"Fisherman's Daughter"
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
Cannibal:Poems -
CannibalPoemsFrom"After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, I"
I had seen whole cities turn to smoke through
a night vision mirage, a millennia of history smeared
green like a video game. So my siblings and I crouched and waited
for their bombs, never forgetting we too were godless.
Back then we passed one sweaty dream back and forth
between us like a hot bowl. It could have been hope,
our heads two broken calabash halves,
catching the old voices like rain, while the stars held
their breath in the August shade for her return.
But one could be lost anywhere. Here in our sea village
the whole world swam drunk in the pool of my navel,
streets littered in emptiness after the last
astronauts had left us, my father one homeless lion
moaning silently under a broke-glass sky,
a blue palm bent in to feed us news of his storm,
the way what is unwritten whispers unto itself.
Cannibal:Poems -
CannibalPoemsFrom"Dreaming in Foreign"
after Caliban
How time holds me under
a shadow I cannot name, the bush-music and its sweet
bangarang. Do not wake me. Downtown
I’ll roam wild with the improbable goats,
window-cleaners careening through traffic,
ripe urchin bartering his endless hope:
Each day is usable, I want to tell them.
Our hunger is criminal, faces sewn shut.
We are tongue-tied with the songs
of unknown birds, an extinct diction. Fireburn
that shipwreck, its aimless curse. Jah, guide
these words, this life an invisible column, my one
bloodline stretching, red livewire vein, to appear across
these hijacked decades, inventing Paradise.
Cannibal:Poems
“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, The Boston Review
“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
“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 [on Cannibal]
Selected Works
Rich and mythic, heavy with the legacy of family and history, many of Safiya Sinclair’s poems are inspired by her childhood in Jamaica; a richness and density in the imagery conveys a lush beauty and danger. There is traveling involved as you turn her pages and somehow all of the waterfalls and rivers and roads connect. Follow her sparkling, detailed phrasings and lines and you will arrive drenched in human contact. The mother in these poems recedes into myth, while the father erupts from the page, threatening disruption and disturbance. Other works capture a different life in the United States, one marked by a sense of order and withholding, which is at once reassuring and chilling. There often seems to be dialectics at play between wildness and control. Her poems reveal she is in full bougainvillea bloom.