Zion Roses

By Monica Minott

In Zion Roses, her second collection, Monica Minott's poems grasp the reader's attention with a voice that is distinctively personal, both taut and musical--and tender and muscular when the occasion demands. Her language moves seamlessly and always appropriately between standard and Jamaican patwa, a reflection of a vision that encompasses a Black modernity still very much in touch with its aphoristic folk roots, where the ancestral meets Skype or a Jonkonnu band is stuck in a Kingston traffic jam. It is possible to see Minott's poems as being in a constant dialogue between four quadrants of engagement: with history, with landscape, with personal and family experience, and with the worlds of literature, music, and art. Minott's sense of history is deeply informed by a knowledge of the brutalities of commercial empire and of slavery and Black people's struggles against injustice and for selfhood. There is scarcely a poem that does not have some precisely described sense of the materiality of its circumstance and the interactions between the physical world and human feelings. You sense that what sustains a certain bravery of self-exposure and of risk is a sense of belonging to family.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1845235177
• ISBN13: 9781845235178
• Release Date: July 2021
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.2"