Cannibal

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.

• AcknowledgmentsI.HomePocomaniaIn Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My SeeingFisherman’s DaughterHandsPortrait of Eve as the AnacondaMermaidCatacombsDreaming in ForeignFamily PortraitI Shall Account Myself a Happy CreaturessAutobiographyOsteologyAfter the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, I II.Notes on the State of Virginia, IAmerica the BeautifulAnother White Christmas in VirginiaOne Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, IOne Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, IIOne Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof, IIINotes on the State of Virginia, IIWhite ApocryphaNotes on the State of Virginia, IIINotes on the State of Virginia, IVElocution Lessons with Ms. SilverstoneNotes on the State of Virginia, VLitany for CharlottesvilleNotes on the State of Virginia, VI III.Prayer Book for VanishingConfessorOmenGood HairWoman, WoundWoman, 26, Remains Optimistic as Body Turns to StoneHow to Be an Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the PoetessBirthmark, or Purifying at the SinkLittle Red PlumCenter of the World IV.After the Last Astronauts Had Left Us, II (Laika)Spectre ChimeraHow to Excise a TumorIncorrigibleAugust GhostA SeparationIn the Event of the Last Unhappiness, Return to the SeaAugust in the Country of AnotherKingdom-comeThe Art of UnselfingDoubt V.Crania Americana Notes

"Stunning debut collection"-Publishers Weekly starred review "Reading (and rereading) Sinclair is an urgently necessary, absolutely unparalleled experience."-Diego BÁez, Booklist starred review "This award-winning collection comes to eat you."-Waxwing Literary Journal “Safiya Sinclair writes strange, mythological, gorgeously elaborate lyric poems, with a diction that is both arcane and contemporary. . . . Her language is distinctive, assured, and a marvel to read.”-Cathy Park Hong, from her introduction to Safiya Sinclair in the Boston Review“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, author of Roll Deep “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, author of Bright Dead Things