ARRIVAL: Poems - Softcover

Boyce-Taylor's bold new collection slyly and directly engages topics that have preoccupied major poets for centuries-mortality, cultural heritage, blood belonging, alienation, love, and the challenge of holding nature to the page. Readers will be enriched and enlivened by the grace and compassion at the heart of this casually polyphonic artist."" - Colin Channer, author of Providential and The Girl with the Golden Shoes ""Cheryl Boyce Taylor will sweep you up in her pages with the scent of language. She will present you with what the craft of poetry can offer: precise, glowing, and painfully beautiful language set to a cadence that moves inside the body even after the poem has closed. A stunning contribution to contemporary poetry!"" - Kimiko Hahn, author of Brain Fever

ARRIVAL is a poetic love story between mother and daughter. The poems are road maps, intertwining generations with a narrative beginning in 1950 with a woman who is pregnant with twins. In her seventh month she delivers a stillborn boy and a baby girl weighing less than two pounds. From there, the evocation of a series of catastrophic family events brings forth Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's power to strip her readers down to their most vulnerable. Boyce-Taylor is steeped in the narratives of Trinidad and New York City, colored with metaphorical stew-pot images. She revels in her lyrical range as she weaves these poetic retellings of family, place, and identity.