Caribbean Passion

This feisty, sensuous, and thought-provoking collection of poetry from Opal Palmer Adisa includes powerful poems about the solidarity of women, the female elders of the poet's own family, and the desire for male difference—including the benefits of having a younger lover. In these poems there is no gap between the historical, the political, and the personal, all are defined by the presence or absence of the freedom to enjoy the fruits of life. Whether writing about history, family, black lives, love, or sexual passion, Opal Palmer Adisa has an acute eye for the contraries of experience. A number of poems exhibit a witty dance between food and sexuality—in one poem drinking coconut water becomes a sexual act, while in another, the male body is eroticized metaphorically in terms of a coconut palm. But within this focus on the physical, there is also a keen sense of the oppression of the female body. In her poem “Bumbu Clat,” for example, she explores the deformation of a word that originally signified sisterhood to become part of the most misogynist curses in Jamaican society.

Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaica-born, award-winning poet, educator, and storyteller. She is the author of It Begins With Tears and Tamarind and Mango Women, the 1992 American Book Award winner. She is also the chair of the ethnic studies/cultural diversity program at the California College of Arts and Crafts.