A fearless collection by a trailblazing writer whose poems “represent the people, culture, and topography of the Caribbean in multidimensional, complex ways” (Tanya Shirley)
A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems
brings together, across the span of thirty-plus years, the rebellious, innovative work of the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Pamela Mordecai. From her acclaimed first collection
Journey Poem
published in 1989, to the moving elegy for her murdered brother in
the true blue of islands
, to the stories of freed slaves told in
subversive sonnets
, and on to her dazzling reimaginings of biblical stories,
A Fierce Green Place
highlights the astounding range and depths of a poet who mixes Jamaican Creole with standard English, profanity and reverence with dub and blues, the oral and vernacular with metrical virtuosity. Mordecai’s words, written out of a “womb-space” of sound and power, shine through neo-colonial violence and patriarchy with such lines as: “Women together / in one place will / bleed in solidarity / till every last body / turn super bitch at once."