Description

Celia A Sorhaindo’s engrossing debut, Radical Normalisation, writes back from the margins, bringing readers to her Dominican home. It adjusts perspectives on the universal questions about poetry as a resource and value in the present. Sorhaindo’s wit and linguistic inventiveness are clear in her reflections on the art and the arts, her dramatization of the Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys’s voice, and her reflections on the natural world-a natural world different from others but continuous with them. She records its changes and reckons with it in a series of poems that respond to the destruction visited on Dominica, most recently by Hurricane Maria. Her writing led John Robert Lee to hail, ‘a new voice that speaks with sensitivity, maturity and assurance out of a horrendous experience’.

Publisher Review

'Radical Normalisation is a tour-de-force of ars poetica. In running dialogue with herself and numerous other poets and writers, Sorhaindo repeatedly addresses poetry-and has poetry talk back. Whether focused on survival after a hurricane or the line between "madness" and "unravelling", Sorhaindo pushes, defines, and redefines the terms and stakes of "this poem". In sonically, imagistically, and formally explosive measure, she makes the "normal" radical and frees it to sing in its chains.' - Shara McCallum