Pardon another worthy male interruption (my mention of Christian Campbell's nomination for a Forward Prize in Poetry was the first) of the women's literary fest here...wellll...fest-ish, but it would be wrong of me not to mention that Jamaican writer, Kei Miller, whose work I've featured here before, recently launched two works: a novel, The Last Warner Woman, and a collection of poems, A Light Song of Light.
Read two of the poems from A Light Song of Light, which were published in a May 2010 issue of The Caribbean Review of Books.
And, below are the opening lines of The Last Warner Woman:
Once upon a time there was a leper colony in Jamaica. If you wanted to get there today, you would have to find a man by the name of Ernie McIntyre but who you would simply call Mr. Mac, at his own insistence and also the insistence of others, including his own mother, who knew him by no other name. Mr. Mac was famous for his great big belly, so surprisingly big that the buttons on the one side of his shirt were permanently estranged from the holes they were supposed to be married to on the other; he also had a great big head, and a sprawling set of buttocks, all of which he could somehow manage to squeeze in to the front seat of his Lada taxi, you in the passenger seat, and then make the wild jerky ascent up the red dirt road lined on each side with the broad green leaves of banana trees.
To read more of Miller's work, click on the links below for purchasing information.
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The Last Warner Woman, by Kei Miller (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2010, 256 pp).
A Light Song of Light, by Kei Miller (Carcanet Press, Ltd, 2010, 80 pp).
