Ricantations

Ricantations will reinforce the perception of Collins Klobah as superb poetic storyteller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences. There are absorbingly reflective poems on Juan Carreño de Miranda's paintings of an hyperphagic child, a stray horse that hangs around the poet's property, homunculi in glass bottles in a teaching hospital, the keeper of a butterfly farm, a high-wire circus family, and the irony of Nathan Leopold becoming the expert on Puerto Rican bird life. Poems begin from the most fantastic premises--a Che Guevera club in heaven with prizes for the coolest Che impersonator--then line by line open up her island's secret heart, revealing a society under multiple pressures even before Hurricane Maria, about which the title poem offers a brilliantly hallucinatory picture.