A fearless collection by a trailblazing writer whose poems “represent the people, culture, and topography of the Caribbean in multidimensional, complex ways” (Tanya Shirley)

A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poemsbrings together, across the span of thirty-plus years, the rebellious, innovative work of the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Pamela Mordecai. From her acclaimed first collectionJourney Poempublished in 1989, to the moving elegy for her murdered brother inthe true blue of islands, to the stories of freed slaves told insubversive sonnets, and on to her dazzling reimaginings of biblical stories,A Fierce Green Placehighlights the astounding range and depths of a poet who mixes Jamaican Creole with standard English, profanity and reverence with dub and blues, the oral and vernacular with metrical virtuosity. Mordecai’s words, written out of a “womb-space” of sound and power, shine through neo-colonial violence and patriarchy with such lines as: “Women together / in one place will / bleed in solidarity / till every last body / turn super bitch at once."