Cannibal

With exquisite lyrical precision, Safiya Sinclair is offering us a new muscular music that is as brutal as it is beautiful. Intelligent and elemental, these poems mark the debut of a poet who is dangerously talented and desperately needed. -- Ada Limón
Cannibal is nothing less than an entrancing debut that reveals the teeming intellect and ravishing lucidity of a young poet in full possession of her literary powers. Here is a poetry that richly interrogates power and history while also eloquently and furtively asserting the possibilities of nature, desire, and the body as ceremonial and spiritual sources of resistance and affirmation. -- Major Jackson
Book of the Month: A singingly gifted writer . . . Sinclair riffs on this notion of savagery as she evokes her childhood in Jamaica and explores race relations in the US; womanhood and otherness; post-colonialism and life in exile . . . An astonishing talent. * The Bookseller *
Covers so much ground: her Jamaican background, spirituality, womanhood, America, race relations. She laces words together in a beautiful tapestry, full of history, life, death and, most of all, renewal. -- Morgan Jerkins, New York Times
Filled with beautifully rich imagery . . . Lyrical and provocative, Sinclair's poems teach the reader in rich language what it means to be 'other' * Buzzfeed Books *
Much like June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Sinclair is a force to be reckoned with. Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed. * Lenny Letter *
Cannibal is the dazzling debut volume of Safiya Sinclair, born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and living in the U.S. Her poems shimmer with the rich colours and sounds of her homeland, but running through is a sense of escape and of exile. * Daily Mail *
Precise and provocative poems . . . Sinclair writes with a thrilling sensibility of the texture of savageness * New Statesman *
Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection . . . Sinclair's material interweaves the personal, the historical, and the political with language of stunning originality . . . these poems are physical, enraged and sensual but also reflected and precise. * Scotsman *