Midland by Kwame Dawes, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Winner, Hollis Summers Poetry PrizeKwame Dawes is one of the premiere reggae poets of our time. A musician, actor, scholar, and writer with roots in Ghana, the Caribbean, and Canada, Dawes is one of those rare artists who can move from lyrics to poetry in a single beat. In this new collection of poetry suffused with raw sensuality and a reggae aesthetic, Dawes presents a collision of sounds, tensions, and rhythms. Drawing deeply on his experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, England, and the American South, Dawes seeds his poems with questions of inheritance and "hieroglyphs of belonging." His portrait of an old man on a tropical beach is shaded with memories of colder places. In the 11-page title poem, "a dialect of ire" unfolding like "the hung man dangling/from a live oak," Dawes transforms the poetry of protest into a compassionate search for the "dusty graves" of his ancestors, insisting that his readers look beneath "affinities of skin, sin and suffering" to the roots of a brutal inheritance. In "Excursion to Port Royal," he confronts the abject hunger of history. Like Dawes's earlier work, the poems in Midland treat the mysteries of displacement, loss, and belonging. Now, he has added to this mix the slavery upon which the American South was built and which continues to haunt it today. Midland is Dawes's seventh poetry collection and the first to be published simultaneously in Canada and the US. Prior to publication, it was awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press. | Midland by Kwame Dawes, Paperback | Indigo Chapters