The Predicament of Or

Book excerpt: Celebrated novelist Shani Mootoo, author of the award-winning Cereus Blooms at Night, turns her hand to poetry in a nuanced and lively exploration of desire, identity and personal exile. In haunting and astonishing language, shot through with the speech and rhythms of her native Trinidad, Mootoo walks a breathtaking tightrope-between cultures and identities, between geographical locations, between memory and desire. In a set of bittersweet love poems, she tenderly exposes the contradictions in loving another woman; in a series of exhilarating riffs on language and the effects of colonization, she marries English words to Trinidadian intonation. Here are poems equally lush and philosophical, sensual and startling, spilling forth meaning from experience like blood-red seeds from a pomegranate.