Haunting the Black Air

Haunting the Black Air is a captivating and expansive work. Its landscape and people are rendered so vividly, so imaginatively and so compassionately. Here, conversations reach back and forth in time, and in tribute to writers, musicians, the shopkeeper, even. It is full of music, in the revelry of sound and in echoes (‘a poem is a list of echoes’). Here, ‘myth fulfils the interstice between memory and loss’ (A List of Echoes), because this is a work rooted in tradition and in legacy, that invites careful reading and re-reading. Anthony moves us through elegy, history, through the virtuosity of a jazz riff, the Afrofuturist lens. He writes with an accomplished precision that is generous to the reader, never losing us in all of its experimentation in form, syntax, words, and even letters within the words. This is a powerful, surprising, wonderful book

KEITH JARRETT

It’s a commonplace to say that poetry is connected to music, but Anthony Joseph’s poetry lives in a miraculous space where we’re never quite sure if language or sound predominate . . . In a major leap forward, Joseph continues to astonish with his unique and essential virtuosity in a book that compels rereading and savouring for anyone who wants to know where we’re going next

LAURI SCHEYER, author of A History of African American Poetry

Haunting the Black Airis a visual, rhythmic, percussion-fuelled dis/chord of vignettes across continents and oceans, a kaleidoscope of image and word-power embodied by the powerful presence of aunts and mothers, school friends and inconsistent fathers, characters vivid as the islands they are born or borne from . . . A collection that offers much more than a standard collection of poems, where varying categories are harmonious and surprising in turn, as variable as the experiences and voices Joseph gives utterance to, this is essential reading and a vital addition to the canon of Black writing from the Caribbean

MAGGIE HARRIS, author of I Sing to the Greenhearts

If Mikhail Bulgakov and Ishmael Reed had a godson in Trinidad raised on Rapso and John Coltrane solos then what you'd get is Anthony Joseph

ROGER ROBINSON

Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel; a Black poet haunted by Africa's past as well as a bilingual post-modernist amused by the possibilities of the future

ALI ALIZADEH

Possessing or possessed by requisite bearings, language and lore, Anthony Joseph is fully and beautifully up to the task

NATHANIEL MACKEY

After much silence and absence in life, the poet's father is painstakingly restored in death in a book-length "calypso sonnet" sequence ... Sonnets for Albert movingly makes peace with his shade

GUARDIAN (on Sonnets for Albert)

A luminous collection which celebrates humanity in all its contradictions and breathes new life into this enduring form

TS ELIOT PRIZE JUDGES (on Sonnets for Albert)