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Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive : Being Dreamity, Algoriddims, Chants and Riffs by Marcia Douglas (2025, Trade Paperback)

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This is a collectible paperback uncorrected proof novel with 218 pages.

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherNew Directions Publishing Corporation

ISBN-100811231178

ISBN-139780811231176

eBay Product ID (ePID)18067509257

Product Key Features

Book TitleJamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive : Being Dreamity, Algoriddims, Chants and Riffs

Number of Pages224 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicAfrican American / Historical, Literary

Publication Year2025

GenreFiction

AuthorMarcia Douglas

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight9.5 Oz

Item Length8 in

Item Width5.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2024-026062

Dewey Edition23

TitleLeadingThe

ReviewsSome writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon the culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illuminated and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas., The women in Marcia Douglas's books are proud women: they are the descendants of Queen Nanny, the Maroon chieftain who, according to legend, could catch the bullets of the British soldiers between her teeth., Marcia Douglas lets the sounds fall from on high, in prose that chants down Babylon and confirms the coming, sweeter than can be reckoned, of Zion., the adventurous and immersive latest from Douglas, continues the author's fusion of poetry and prose with a nonlinear tale combining an escape from slavery in 18th-century Jamaica and immigrant life in 2010s America... 'Time and space are twin,' Douglas writes, and as she develops this idea in passages that alternate from prose to verse, the novel takes on a trancelike quality. The author's originality is on full display in this challenging and rewarding work.

Dewey Decimal811.6

SynopsisZooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas' "speculative ancestral project" (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Her new poetic and eco-spiritual book carries further the cultural preservation so central to Douglas' vision. The Shante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters--all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant's struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston's left-behind camera. Each chapter/poem opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And, each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica: For after three hundred years of slaughter, monk seals know better than to reveal themselves to humans. These days, they stay low, adapting to below surface conditions and establishing habitat with the underwater spirits of drowned horses and slaves disappeared overboard. For things happen below sea that have never been told. There is wheelin there and turnin; and far-far down past brochure azure, cerulean and indigo, there is a vast dark ink and vortices of voices caught up in such a trumpet of rah- &-glory bottomsea sound as to move earth's axis. And after that, more ink blue, and cobalt and sapphire and a calm-calm wata-- velvet and kin to the moon brand new. The monk seals dare not go this far. But the spirits do., Marcia Douglas's dreamlike mosaic weaves together ecological prayers, healing wisdom, and buried herstories from the Caribbean and the U.S. Recalling Zora Neale Hurston's time with the maroons in the village of Accompong, the book traces a young woman's flight from New Jersey to the Grand Canyon to escape U.S. immigration officers and follows multiple other Lives: an Ashante woman in the hull of a middle-passage ship, a mother searching across centuries for her missing child, and a wailing youth wandering through dreamscapes, seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. The whole weave is juxtaposed against botanical, animal, and planetary migrations and the riddim and chant of the cosmos. Carrying on Douglas's "speculative ancestral project" (Whiting Foundation), The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive further explores themes of loss, survival, and deliverance. Through an immersive storytelling, richly Layered with drawings and footnotes on flora, fauna, and natural phenomena, Douglas preserves and reimagines "the movement of Jah people" and the cultural memory of the African diaspora., A startling new dream-like vision of Jamaica--a work of surreal poetic fiction, lavishly studded with ecological prayers, drawings, and footnotes about healing herbs, disappearing flora-fauna, and buried herstories--by Whiting Award winner Marcia Douglas

LC Classification NumberPS3554.O8274J36 2025