Cannibal (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award 

Winner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Poetry)

An American Library Association "Notable Book of the Year" 

Finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award 

Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award

Longlisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize 

One of BuzzFeed's Best Poetry Books of 2016

One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2016"

A Publishers Weekly "Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2016"

Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.

Safiya Sinclair was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and the Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.