This Strange Land - Hardcover

McCallum, Shara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1882295862 ISBN 13: 9781882295869

Publisher: Alice James Books, 2011

Synopsis

These poems probe the definition of Motherland. Shara McCallum homogenizes childhood memories of her native Jamaica with a revised understanding of danger and corruption, teasing out notions of history, language, motherhood, rupture, memory, and identity. She weaves new cloth of oral tradition, struggling to arrange a comfort zone within the foreign manufactures of suburbia. Hers is the skilled music of a master.

About this title

About the Author:

Shara McCallum is the author of Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). Originally from Jamaica, she lives with her family in central Pennsylvania, where she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and teaches creative writing and literature at Bucknell University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From "From the Book of Mothers":

What is separation's geography?

The mother's body is the country

of our earliest memory, the soil

from which we are formed.

Our lives are an arc of flight:

away, toward, away.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1882295862
• ISBN 13: 9781882295869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80