Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry

This book represents the very first sustained account of Caribbean women's poetry and offers investigation of an exciting range of innovative texts. The discussion is situated in relation to the predominantly male tradition of Caribbean poetry, and explores the factors which have resulted in the relative marginality of women poets within nationalistic poetic discourses. Denise deCaires Narain employs a range of cutting-edge feminist and postcolonial approaches to focus on a wide range of themes, such as orality, sexuality, the body, performance and poetic identity. Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry provides detailed readings of individual poems by women poets whose work has not yet received the sustained critical attention it deserves. These readings are contextualized both within Caribbean cultural debates and postcolonial and feminist critical discourses in a lively and engaged way; revisiting nationalist debates as well as topical issues about the performance of gendered and raced identities within poetic discourse. It will be ground-breaking reading for all those interested in postcolonialism, Gender Studies, Caribbean Studies and contemporary poetry.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.