The Sea Needs No Ornament - Ed. Loretta Collins Klobah & Maria Grau Perejoan

Thirty-three poets from the English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean offer poems in a variety of forms and styles—from free verse, formal, experimental, and exuberant to minimalist— employing a range of language registers, including borrowings from children’s ring games to blues rhythms. They speak in equally varied lyrical, ironic, incensed, carnivalesque, meditative, and transgressive. Poems range over all aspects of women’s lives, from childhoods of joy or sorrow, relationships with men and women, motherhood, elder years, as part of collectivities or in solitude. Poems focus on the female body as a source of self-knowledge, pleasure, strength, blood, invasion, and sometimes abuse.