These poems are shaped by the various places Malika Booker has come to know as home: Brooklyn, Brixton, Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana. One minute we're in Grenada, the next at border control in Heathrow – all part of a larger story of diaspora and displacement.
Influenced by the likes of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Sharon Olds and Toi Derricotte, Booker weaves a visceral, emotive patchwork of the dramas inherent in both extraordinary world travel and ordinary domestic life.
PRAISE for Pepper Seed
"There is a wounded frankness here, but also a clear-eyed wondering at the roots of our miseries, as well as the imaginative resilience to transcend them." W. N. Herbert
"Malika Booker’s poems are raw as chili peppers rubbed into a wound, but what enthralls is the way she delivers her narratives in rapturous language that has the power to heal. This is poetry as revelation and prayer." Pascale Petit
"This is an auspicious and important debut, perhaps the most important in recent years." Anthony Joseph
Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her pamphlet Breadfruit was published by Flipped Eye in 2008, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poems are widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Out of Bounds: Black & Asian Poets, edited by Jackie Kay, and Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra. She has represented British writing internationally, both independently and with the British Council, in such countries as Slovenia, Switzerland, New Zealand, India and Azerbaijan. Malika was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She lives in south London.
About the Author :
Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her poems are widely published in anthologies and journals including, Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry, Black & Asian Poets, Out of Bounds, and Ten New Poets. She has represented British writing internationally, both independently and with the British Council, and has written for the stage and radio. She was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the author of Breadfruit.
