The Twelve Foot Neon Woman. Cet article n’est pas disponible.The Twelve Foot Neon Woman

OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2012 Poetry winner

Short listed for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the Forward poetry prizes 2012

Loretta Collins Klobah gives us a twelve-foot woman with red neon surging through her veins, who boldly and gracefully takes on the challenges of urban life. Against a soundtrack of world music, from salsa to reggae to jazz, and in a vibrant blend of English, Spanish and patois, she delivers both tender and incendiary hymns of homage to the Caribbean, America and London.

Scrutinizer, witness, and warner woman, she turns her electric gaze on the everyday world and its extraordinary people. In poems that are lyrical, narrative, sensual and often experimental, she whispers curses against bad-mindedness, sings chants of prophecy, recites praisesongs to the radiance of rebellion and wails lamentations for those men, women and children who have been annihilated, lost or forgotten. There are quiet mediations, too, upon the lives of girl children, women in precarious situations, older women and enduring friendships between women.

The world of her poems is urban and aggressively contemporary, but she sees the enduring presence of splendid, though endangered, nature and of the spirit-world, which together offer green-hearted hope for the future and the possibility of cultural metamorphosis.

Loretta Collins Klobahis a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico. Her poetry has been anthologized in the "1996 Pushcart Prize Anthology," "TriQuarterly New Writers," and the collection "How Much Earth? ""