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Guabancex

Guabancex

by Celia A. Sorhaindo

Imprint: Papillote Press

36 Pages, 5.8 x 8.2 in

Paperback
9781999776879
April 2020
Temporarily out of stock. Ships in 8-12 weeks.

$9.00

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Longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

On 18 September 2017, a category 5 hurricane, the worst in recorded history, hit the Caribbean island of Dominica. Hurricane Maria destroyed lives and land. Nothing would be the same again. Guabancex, the first published collection of poems by Celia A. Sorhaindo, explores the complex mix of experiences and emotions, both during and after the event.

Celia A. Sorhaindo was born in Dominica. She left when she was eight, lived for many years in the UK and returned home in 2005. Her poems have been published in Caribbean journals and in the anthology, New Daughters of Africa. She has been long-listed for the UK National Poetry competition.

Guabancex ‘explores the complex mix of experiences and emotions’ that erupted when (and after) Hurricane Maria ripped through the island of Dominica on 18th September 2017. Its title invokes the indigenous Taíno’s ‘supreme female spiritual entity associated with all natural destructive forces’. What stands out most for me is the way the poet both calls in and questions religious faith in the face of carnage. ~Sphinx

The forms of many of the poems mirror the chaotic, wind-tossed nightmare of the hurricane that devastated Dominica. A poem filled with words not metaphors, Invoked and Hurricane Praxis are, on the page, words flung about in the strong gusts of memory that evoke the terrifying and dislocating experience. ~Newsday

The collection is tonally an emotional roller coaster. Its imagery is precise and evocative. Its energy and word flow; use of symbolism, metaphor, anthropomorphism, allusions; its play on words, and blurring of the lines between realism and mythology. All of this elevates it. ~Jhohadli