The Dreaming

Gay characters search for sex, adventure, pleasure, self-realisation, and love in Trinidad. Written with a highly enjoyable sharpness of perception and an engaging personal voice these stories find room for humour, tattoos, barbershops, and terrible poetry, but also acute fear in a society where gay men experience prejudice, discrimination, and homophobic violence. Bagoo’s stories offer a witty and acutely drawn portrait of contemporary Trinidad in all its intersections of race, class, and gender politics. Not least, they share a strong sense of place—Bagoo’s gay Woodbrook offers a fine sequel to V.S. Naipaul’s Woodbrook stories in his classic Miguel Street.

Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer, the author of four books of poems including BURN (Shearsman, 2012), Pitch Lake (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) and a book of essays, The Undiscovered Country) Peepal Tree Press, 2020). The Undiscovered Country was winner the non-fiction category of the 2021 OCM Bocas prize for Caribbean Literature.