Radical Normalisation

Celia A Sorhaindo's engrossing debut, Radical Normalisation, writes back from the margins, bringing readers to her Dominican home. It adjusts perspectives on the universal questions about poetry as a resource and value in the present. Sorhaindo's wit and linguistic inventiveness are clear in her reflections on the art and the arts, her dramatization of the Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys's voice, and her reflections on the natural world—a natural world different from others but continuous with them. She records its changes and reckons with it in a series of poems that respond to the destruction visited on Dominica, most recently by Hurricane Maria. Her writing led John Robert Lee to hail, 'a new voice that speaks with sensitivity, maturity and assurance out of a horrendous experience.'

Celia A Sorhaindo was born in the Commonwealth of Dominica. She migrated with her family to England in 1976, when she was eight years old, returning home in 2005. Her poems have been published in Verse Daily, Illuminations International Magazine, Rattle, Mslexia, Wasafiri, Anomaly, Magma Poetry, Lolwe, New Daughters of Africa Anthology, and Caribbean journals PREE, The Caribbean Writer, BIM, Moko Magazine and Susumba's Book Bag. Her first poetry chapbook, Guabancex, longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was published in February 2020, also by Papillote Press.