Linzey Corridon’s new poetry collection West of West Indian (Mawenzi House, 2024) is out this month. Author H Nigel Thomas describes it here: “These are brilliantly crafted, meaningful poems that depict life’s vicissitudes from a queer Caribbean Canadian perspective. Linzey’s themes reflect the deepest needs of all humans—the need for friends, community, and strength to face life’s challenges. West of West Indian is a significant contribution to the emerging body of works by Caribbean-Canadian LGBTQ+ authors.”

Description: West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as simultaneously individual and collective, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. It collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey into queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing through the bodies and minds of its many subjects.

Rinaldo Walcott (Professor and Carl V Granger Chair, Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo) says, “History, love, and sexuality intertwine in these poems to offer us an expansive view of Black queer life. The brutal realities of history both intimate and public span continents, are lodged in diaspora sensibilities and realities and refuse subordination to the regimes of an imagined Euro-American normal. In Corridon’s voice, a new, a gentle and a different account of a Caribbean queer gaze and life is made available to readers. The monstruous intimacies of history and the brutal geographies of diaspora cannot extinguish the love these poems exude, the community made on the page, and the history reworked for fuller living and possibility for all of us.”

Linzey Corridon is a mixed-race (Afro-Euro-Indo Caribbean) educator, and a Vincentian-Canadian poet and critic. He is the 2021 recipient of Canada’s Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and is currently completing doctoral work on the nuances of the Queeribbean quotidian at McMaster University. His writing has been published in The Puritan, Kola, SX Salon, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Montreal Writes, and more. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

For more information, see https://www.mawenzihouse.com/product/west-of-west-indian/ and https://www.westofwestindian.com