Rich drawings of young people from around the world are posthumously paired with lyrical text, bringing the stories of these people, their worlds, and their unique experiences to life.

I Saw Your Face

Children's Books

Dawes, Kwame

Feelings, Tom

Literature & Fiction

Dial

As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. 
As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.

City of Bones: A Testament

Poetry

TriQuarterly

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets

Before the Caribbean-inflected spoken-word poetry of the 1990s, epitomized by poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan, there was reggae. In the past thirty years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the shores of the United States on waves of music, in the lyrics of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. Kwame Dawes, himself a musician and poet, is not surprised by this phenomenon. The region's political and cultural awakening of the 1970s was fueled by a growing African consciousness, often in competition with the multiple traditions―European, Indian, Chinese―that have permeated many Caribbean nations for centuries. The influence of reggae has produced a poetry that is quite different from earlier work from the Caribbean, but this is only one more chapter in a tradition characterized by continuing tension with a diverse heritage.
The interviews in Talk Yuh Talk reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from those poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae, calypso, folk music, and "yard" theater to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative. Kwame Dawes talks with many of the most important poets to have emerged from the Caribbean who are still writing today. The poets discuss their techniques, their situations as poets, and the challenges they face in the profession and in their craft. Well-known figures like Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred D'Aguiar, and Martin Carter share space with such lesser-known but equally important poets as Mervyn Morris and Kendel Hippolyte.
In a specific introduction to each poet, Dawes offers a sense of what is important or meaningful about the poet's work. He explores detachment with Mervyn Morris, intellectual rigor with David Dabydeen, the struggles of obscurity with Cyril Dabydeen, the poetics of surprise and the erotic with Grace Nichols, the reggae escape motif with Lillian Allen, ambivalence about Africa with James Berry, and more, talking with eighteen poets in all. By allowing them to speak in their own voices and by directing the questions along the lines of creative process and aesthetics, Dawes makes a compelling case for the strength of Caribbean poetry while offering a lively source of inspiration and information for practicing poets as well as critics.

History & Criticism

University of Virginia Press

Midland: Poems (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize)

The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is “a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance. ... It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father’s example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement. ... The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging.”Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.

United States

Ohio University Press

This in-depth analysis of the reggae superstar’s poetry in lyric form delves into the songwriter’s intellect and spirituality with scholarly precision usually more associated with Bob Dylan or John Lennon. Thought of as the folk poet of the developing world, Marley influenced generations of musicians and writers throughout the Western hemisphere. He was a performer who held true to his heritage, yet is still awarded the status of world rock star. Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius features interviews with key people and musicians who knew the man. It’s the perfect companion to Bob Marley’s recordings. Previously published by Sanctuary.

Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Bobcat Books

Winner of the prize for the best first collection in the Forward Poetry Prize of 1994, Progeny of Air explores a childhood and youth spent in 1970's Jamaica. The collection links inner personal experience and social and historical perspectives to mutually enriching effect.

Progeny of Air

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

As 24-hour television, belching out the swaggering voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild, matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. Clarice's visions give her power; Thalbot is at the mercy of every wandering spirit. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice 'sins' on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins...

Prophets (Peepal Tree Caribbean Poetry)

Religion & Spirituality

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader--serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry. From "Recall" Oh, pipe me back to my familiar earth, for it is slipping slowly from me.

Sturge Town: Poems

W.W.Norton&Company

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dawes, Kwame. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dawes, Kwame

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dawes, Kwame. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

I Saw Your Face

City of Bones: A Testament

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets

Midland: Poems (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize)

Midland: Poems (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize)

Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius

Progeny of Air

Prophets (Peepal Tree Caribbean Poetry)

Sturge Town: Poems