Table of Contents
Corporal Teego Brown Tells Us What Every Bartender in Jamaica Knows
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) for a 2015 Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry, and to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: Prairie Schooner, Renaissance Noire, The Common and Harvard Review.
I must in addition turn thanks to Kwame Dawes for his steady encouragement, elegant notes and wise counsel. I offer gratitude to Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press and Johnny Temple of Akashic Books for their stalwart support.
Chris Abani, Olga Broumas, Gregory Pardlo, Chase Twichell, Ishion Hutchinson—from being around you I inhaled much knowing of what it takes to make a poem. Thanks for the secondhand smoke.
Marie Brown has been there since the first book. The Book of Jamaica made me want to write.
REVOLUTIONARY TO RASS
(for Perry Henzell)
Rangers.
That is what they are.
Perry shifts in a pink Adirondack
rooted in the grass. We’re on a cliff between
a white adobe cottage and the sea.
Canoes crawl far on the red skyline.
In these last years, last months, last days,
he talks like he’s always—
grand and sweeping.
The white beard mops his neck.
He plays prophet.
Facing twilight with his son-out-law
relaxing
in the second chair,
the director
who shot Rhygin in a star shirt,
made Cliff reggae Django,
talks like he knows. Still, he proves.
As a boy, and don’t forget,
he
