Five Poems

Abstract

A grandmother’s lost leg. A mother’s scarred sacrum. A daughter transformed into stone. In these five poems, history dwells in the body, the past deep in the bone. Confronting themes of poverty, intimate partner violence, and childhood sexual trauma, the poems speak to the varying ways the poet and women in her family have insisted on survival. These poems bear shifts in landscape and language, namely, from St. Lucia to the United States, from Antillean Creole to American English. Part of a manuscript in progress, the poems seek to probe inherited and lived-through pain so as to move the spirit ever more deeply toward healing, wholeness, and promise.