Caribbean Blues and Love's Genealogy

In his new collection of poetry, Kuwabong brings a mature voice and a larger poetic vision to celebrate love. In Book One the love that is celebrated emerges from a deep sense of historical reconnection with African ancestors taken captive and sent to the Caribbean. The poems performs a retrospective search for the roots that his African ancestors planted in the new world without romanticizing their struggles, defeats, and victories. Thus they recreate the continental African as a seeker of a poetic understanding of the Arican Diaspora in the Caribbean. In Book Two Kuwabong takes the reader through a Prufrockian maze of relationships complicated by expectations and disappointments. The city of Hamilton, Ontario, provides the emotial and physical landscapes that initiate responses to love made tricky by the extreme challenges of the mundane. Though the poems silently scream with pain and disappointment, these moods are calmed by epiphanies of tenderness that bind.