Overview

Christine Roseeta Walker's first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches – especially of girls and women – Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.

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9781800174009

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Reviews

"'Christine Roseeta Walker can spin a long line as thick as crabs in a barrel foaming and looking for a 'mongoose sun'. Equally, she can shape a narrow concrete poem like a stick, re-delivering the impact of remembered shock. Poem after poem, the Island itself wraps you in every aspect of its texture. You will be compelled by greeting cards and cobwebs, fireflies and broken glasses, cemetery and bedroom. Through the lived and dreamt encounters of humans and other sensitive creatures desirous of a better world, Coco Island delicately explores current cruelty and the legacy of transgenerational trauma. Both magician and engineer, Walker steers us through perspectival shifts, resisting familiar ""Caribbean"" tropes: grandmothers don't provide teaching, mischief is in the undeclared, and madness and witchcraft pass down from Macbeth's cold land. The gorgeousness of narrative, dramatic, and other forms of saying and writing grip you and pull you close.' - Anthony Vahni Capildeo;'Not least among the achievements of Christine Roseeta Walker's work is an enviable kind of literary alchemy. Her poems transmute the stuff of a Jamaican childhood and heritage into a language which both invites and quietly disturbs.' - Rachel Mann"

Author Information

Christine Roseeta Walker is a Jamaican poet and novelist living on the outskirts of Manchester, England. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Salford and the University of Manchester. Her debut novel, The Grass is Weeping, is a revenge tragedy set in Jamaica. She also works as a commissioned poet with an archaeologist working in the Peak District, and she spends her time writing and organising poetry reading workshops in care homes for people living with dementia.

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