Overview

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader—serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.

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9781324076315

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Reviews

"""Like one of his heroes, Bob Marley, Dawes changes not just the way readers look at the world but the lens through which they see reality. His is a transcendent vision, filled with tenderness, curiosity, and compassion for what has been and what might be."" -- Herman Sutter - Library Journal (starred review) ""Wise and generous, this illustrates a poetic journey toward self-understanding."" -- Publishers Weekly"

"""Like one of his heroes, Bob Marley, Dawes changes not just the way readers look at the world but the lens through which they see reality. His is a transcendent vision, filled with tenderness, curiosity, and compassion for what has been and what might be."" -- Herman Sutter - Library Journal (starred review)"

"""Sturge Town is named for one of the earliest free villages in Jamaica, Dawes’s family home. From this psychogeographic starting point…unspools a richly intelligent, deeply descriptive exploration of home and identity…This personal odyssey becomes a universal journey."" -- Fiona Sampson - The Guardian ""Kwame Dawes is an exquisite poet, a profound poet, a quiet poet, a great poet."" -- Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other ""Every poem in this collection seems to be the best of what it tries to be, whether an observation, anthropological recovery, ode, elegy, or even an ars poetica…This verse collection is the twenty-first for Dawes, and the eighty-six poems here demonstrate a full, masterful command of his art."" -- Scott LaMascus - World Literature Today ""Like one of his heroes, Bob Marley, Dawes changes not just the way readers look at the world but the lens through which they see reality. His is a transcendent vision, filled with tenderness, curiosity, and compassion for what has been and what might be."" -- Herman Sutter - Library Journal (starred review) ""Wise and generous, this illustrates a poetic journey toward self-understanding."" -- Publishers Weekly"

Author Information

Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He is a chancellor emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022, Kwame Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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