The Face of Water New and Selected Poems

Lyrical and well-crafted, this collection of poetry presents some of Jamaican poet Shara McCallum's best work. While touching upon various topics--including migration, identity, family relationships, motherhood, mental illness, storytelling, folklore, and myth--these poems transform the most painful and sometimes mundane details of life into works of terrible and satisfying beauty. Emotionally engaging and intellectually stimulating, this compilation celebrates the poetics of both the Caribbean and of North America.

Shara McCallum is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and the author of three individual collections of poetry, Song of Thieves, This Strange Land, and The Water Between Us. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her personal essays have appeared in the Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Witness. She lives Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.