Haunting the Black Air

Anthony Joseph writes as if language itself were a drumhead stretched tight across history, each line struck with precision, improvisation and risk. The gorgeous poems in Haunting the Black Air bend and fracture, accumulate and release, carrying grief, beauty, violence and love in the same breath where intellect and instinct dissolve into rhythm, and rhythm, in turn, becomes a form of knowledge. The result is a poetics that is as rigorous as it is sensuous, as grounded in lived experience as it is open to the surreal and the visionary. This is a work of rare formal daring and spiritual depth – a book of friendship that enlarges what poetry can do, how it can sound and how it can carry the weight of the world while still singing -- PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy
Haunting the Black Airis a visual, rhythmic, percussion-fuelled dis/chord of vignettes across continents and oceans, a kaleidoscope of image and word-power embodied by the powerful presence of aunts and mothers, school friends and inconsistent fathers, characters vivid as the islands they are born or borne from . . . A collection that offers much more than a standard collection of poems, where varying categories are harmonious and surprising in turn, as variable as the experiences and voices Joseph gives utterance to, this is essential reading and a vital addition to the canon of Black writing from the Caribbean -- MAGGIE HARRIS, author of I Sing to the Greenhearts
If Mikhail Bulgakov and Ishmael Reed had a godson in Trinidad raised on Rapso and John Coltrane solos then what you'd get is Anthony Joseph -- ROGER ROBINSON
Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel; a Black poet haunted by Africa's past as well as a bilingual post-modernist amused by the possibilities of the future -- ALI ALIZADEH
Possessing or possessed by requisite bearings, language and lore, Anthony Joseph is fully and beautifully up to the task -- NATHANIEL MACKEY
After much silence and absence in life, the poet's father is painstakingly restored in death in a book-length "calypso sonnet" sequence ... Sonnets for Albert movingly makes peace with his shade * GUARDIAN (on Sonnets for Albert) *
A luminous collection which celebrates humanity in all its contradictions and breathes new life into this enduring form -- TS ELIOT PRIZE JUDGES (on Sonnets for Albert)