Cannibal

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 LimónCannibal 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 JacksonBook of the Month: A singingly gifted writer … Sinclair riffs on this notion of savagery as she evokes her childhood in Jamaica and explores race relations in the US; womanhood and otherness; post-colonialism and life in exile … An astonishing talent. * The Bookseller *Covers so much ground: her Jamaican background, spirituality, womanhood, America, race relations. She laces words together in a beautiful tapestry, full of history, life, death and, most of all, renewal. – Morgan Jerkins, New York TimesFilled with beautifully rich imagery … Lyrical and provocative, Sinclair’s poems teach the reader in rich language what it means to be ‘other’ * Buzzfeed Books *Much like June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Sinclair is a force to be reckoned with. Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed. * Lenny Letter *Cannibal is the dazzling debut volume of Safiya Sinclair, born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and living in the U.S. Her poems shimmer with the rich colours and sounds of her homeland, but running through is a sense of escape and of exile. * Daily Mail *Precise and provocative poems … Sinclair writes with a thrilling sensibility of the texture of savageness * New Statesman *Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection … Sinclair’s material interweaves the personal, the historical, and the political with language of stunning originality … these poems are physical, enraged and sensual but also reflected and precise. * Scotsman *

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal 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 honours include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. She is writing a memoir chronicling her life growing up in Jamaica.