Our most enthusiastic congratulations to Andre Bagoo, whose poetry collection, Burn (Shearsman Books, 2015), is now on the shelves. See comments by fellow Caribbeanists below:

Poet laureate of Jamaica Mervyn Morris writes: “Shapely intimations of disaster, poems of incendiary grace.”

Loretta Collins-Klobah (University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras) writes:  “Burn is a kaleidoscopic, surreal and stunning collection. Bagoo forges carnivalesque, enigmatic, experimental, vivid, wild and wonder-inspiring poems full of verve and utterly fresh language that are, by turns, eerie, elegiac, fleshy, pensive, mournful, rhapsodic and absolutely scorching…

Poems traverse geographical locations, from his island home of Trinidad, to other Caribbean islands and as far distant as Iceland. There, personal and societal angst, passions and pleasures are held up to a ‘sea of mirrors,’ into which we gaze. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together and animating douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn.”

Andre Bagoo (1983) is a journalist and poet living in Trinidad. He writes for Newsday and his work has been published in journals such as Boston Review, Caribbean Review of Books and The Caribbean Writer. He is editor of the arts blog Pleasure (http://www.pleasurett.blogspot.com/).

For purchasing information, see http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/category/819-bagoo-andre/product/5103-andre-bagoo—burn