Difficult Fruit
A collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge--of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world--this offering from Trinidadian poet Lauren Alleyne grapples with personal experience. The poems form a lyric memoir of the author's life, chronicling a journey that includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. The central poem, "Eighteen," which narrates the aftermath of sexual assault, and another, "Thirty," which addresses the virtues of self-reliance, are representative of several poems of age that both chronicle and disrupt time, looking at the speaker's past as a way to understand the present. These poems are a movement through fracture--both necessary and unwarranted--toward wholeness and transformation. This debut collection introduces a striking new voice in poetry.
Lauren Alleyne
Lauren Alleyne hails from the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and a graduate certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University. Her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Black Arts Quarterly, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Carribbean Writer, The Crab Orchard Review, Belleview Literary Review, The Banyan Review, Let Spirits Speak, Guernica, Growing Up Girl, and Gathering Ground, among others. A Cave Canem graduate, her work has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2010 Small Axe Literary Prize, a 2012 Lyrical Iowa Award, an Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, and honorable mention in the 2009 Reginald Shepard Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is currently the Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque in Iowa.