I Am Evidence

Description

Courtney Conrad's powerful work interrogates the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, she is unflinching in her attempts to capture the vibrancy and violence of her experiences in both the UK and Jamaica. Her poetry draws together subversive diasporic imagery, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative in its exacting response to the political corruption and violence she witnessed as a young girl in Jamaica in the wake of its colonial subjugation under the British Empire. The themes of her work stretch across state- and gender-based violence, religion, raw bodily introspection and lush cultural memorabilia that reimagines the warmth and blood of both her homes.

I Am Evidence was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker, and includes some work which won her an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. It is her debut pamphlet.

Product Details

Price

$10.00 $9.30

Publisher

Bloodaxe Books

Publish Date

November 07, 2023

Pages

Dimensions

5.83 X 8.27 X 0.09 inches | 0.12 pounds

Language

English

Type

Paperback

EAN/UPC

9781780376561

BISAC Categories:

European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Caribbean & Latin American

Subjects & Themes - General

Women Authors

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About the Author

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet who now lives in London. Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2023) was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker, and includes some work which won her an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. She received a Bridport Prize Young Writer Award in 2021. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet's Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award's Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in Magma Poetry, The White Review, Poetry Review, Bath Magg and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She is an alumna of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, MPK, Obsidian, Griots Well Collective, Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and Barbican Young Poets.

Reviews

"Courtney Conrad is one of the most promising voices to emerge in the British literary world. A voice of affirmation, testimony, survival and revival. The Jamaican spirit of remixing and mashing up English into new and deeper coherences. These poems are evidence of a truth-telling lyrical arrival."--Raymond Antrobus
"Courtney Conrad is an important voice to watch. Her book I Am Evidence
feels like a new shot in the Caribbean Artist Movement. Throughout the
book her identity and culture resonate in the fresh use of national
language which enables a nuanced unspooling of hidden Caribbean
narratives exploring the micro of Jamaica's underclass as it alludes to
the macro of Jamaican politics."--Roger Robinson

"Conrad is forging her own distinctive Jamaican poetic seeped in a
literary orality, which enables the witness bearing of: the persevered,
the forsaken, the rock bottom, the hold on better must come, all
speaking to a fragile existence. Yet these are not downtrodden but
celebrated as resilient. Conrad continues the tradition of Jamaican
poets like Louise Bennett, Jean 'Binta' Breeze and Olive Senior who
unapologetically empowered the working-class voice.'"--Malika Booker

Poetry