Pamela Mordecai’s A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems is available for pre-ordering from New Directions Books. This poetry collection by Pamela Mordecai—edited by Carol Bailey and Stephanie Mckenzie, with a contribution by Tanya Shirley—will be on the shelves on May 17, 2022.

Description: A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems brings together, across the span of thirty-plus years, the rebellious, innovative work of the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Pamela Mordecai.

From her acclaimed first collection Journey Poem published in 1989, to the moving elegy for her murdered brother in The True Blue of Islands, to the stories of freed slaves told in Subversive Sonnets, and on to her dazzling reimaginings of biblical stories, A Fierce Green Place highlights the astounding range and depths of a poet who mixes Jamaican Creole with standard English, profanity and reverence with dub and blues, the oral and vernacular with metrical virtuosity. Mordecai’s words, written out of a “womb-space” of sound and power, shine through neocolonial violence and patriarchy with such lines as: “Women together / in one place will / bleed in solidarity / till every last body / turn super bitch at once.”

For more information, see https://www.ndbooks.com/book/a-fierce-green-place/