Hope's Hospice and Other Poems

Frank and earnest, this moving collection of poetry offers a glimpse into the support centers and hospice outside of Montego Bay and the many lives that have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Culled from open dialogue with sufferers and those who care for them, and coupled with evocative photographs, AIDS becomes a channel for universal dramas, archetypal voices, stoicism, despair, and deeply human deceptions. Full of memories of a time when diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence, each piece brings the lives of the indiscriminant victims to the forefront and battles the notion that this can only happen to others.

Kwame Dawes is a poet, an editor, and a professor of english at the University of South Carolina. He is the founder and director of the USC Poetry Initiative and the programmer for the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina. Joshua Cogan is a documentary photographer and anthropologist whose work has appeared in the LA Times, The New Yorker, and Wall Street Journal. He lives in Washington, DC.