Tiphanie Yanique

" A major debut from an award-winning writer-an epic family saga set against the magic and the rhythms of the Virgin Islands. In the early 1900s an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea, just as the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule. Orphaned by the sunk vessel are two sisters and their half-brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of...

Like Gabriel GarcIa Marquez, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Conde before her, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a debut collection that is heartbreaking, hilarious, and mesmerizing. Set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands, these lyrical and haunting stories are part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, but ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place.

The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Poems that are cutting about male self-deceptions and arrogations of power speak to poems that display a deep sensitivity to...