Showing results by author "Kwame Dawes" in All Categories

Esther, a painter living in Jamaica and recovering from the death of her husband, comes across a man on a mountain road with no memory of his past. As a hurricane rushes towards the island, she shelters the handsome stranger, names him “Monty”, and tries to uncover the mystery of his missing memory. She soon finds herself falling in love with a man she barely knows, and who doesn’t even know himself. The Mountain and the Sea is a romantic tale about letting go of the past and embracing the present.

In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work - the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape.

This groundbreaking Jamaican narrative poem takes on history, faith, sex, and poetry itself. As 24-hour television - belching out the swaggering voices of American hellfire preachers - competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice's visions give her power; Thalbot is at the mercy of every wandering spirit. But when Clarice, under the cover of darkness, 'sins' on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom.

When Ferron Morgan's father dies in suspicious circumstances, his trauma is exacerbated by the conflict within his family and among his father's friends over whether the death was the result of medical negligence or if it was a political assassination. Ferron grew up in awe of his father's radical political endeavors, but in later years he watched as the resurgence of the political right in the Caribbean in the 1980s robbed the man of his faith.