Everyone Knows I am a Haunting - Paperback

by Shivanee Ramlochan (Author)

Shivanee Ramlochan's poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards.

In these poems, a woman is invariably the protagonist and Ramlochan is eloquent in her exploration of the ways in which gender has to be negotiated. They constantly challenge the stereotypes of the female. The female force that Ramlochan explores in her poems is creative and destructive, vulnerable and untameable. In poem after poem, the female assumes the elemental roles of both saviour and devil.

Author Biography

Shivanee Ramlochan's poetry has been published in tongues of the ocean and The Caribbean Review of Books, and is forthcoming in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is an alumna of the 2010 Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Caribbean Writers. In 2013, she was selected as one of three New Talent Showcase writers at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.