Shara McCallum

No Ruined Stone is a verse sequence rooted in the life of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1786, Burns arranged to migrate to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation, a plan he ultimately abandoned. Voiced by a fictive Burns and his fictional granddaughter, a "mulatta" passing for white, the book asks: what would have happened had he gone?

Madwoman is McCallum’s fifth collection of poetry. Haunting and elusive, the poems in Shara McCallum's Madwoman are also transformative, seeking to chart and intertwine three stages of a mother's life from childhood to adulthood to motherhood. Rich with the complexities that join these states of being, the poems wrestle with the idea of being girl, woman and mother at once. McCallum questions how we form our identities and who shapes those identities for us.

Haunting, alarming, transformative, and elusive, these poems bridge together the gaps between development stages: from girl, to woman, and then mother. With the complexities that intertwine them, can you be all three at once? Who shapes our identity, and who is in control here? How do we recognize, acknowledge, and honor the changing of who we are?

"This is a marvellous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended." Library Review Since the publication of her first collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum has steadily created a rich body of poems, mining the rich deposit of emotional and intellectual capital in her background of multiple migrations. Her work has explored what it means to emerge from childhood in a Rastafarian home filled with reckless idealism and enter a new world of American landscapes and values. The Face of Water collects some of her best poems, poems that establish her as a poet of deft craft, and craftiness. She manages in these poems to enact the grand alchemy of the best poems – the art of transforming the most painful and sometimes mundane details of life into works of terrible and satisfying beauty. Shara McCallum hails from Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of three collections of poetry: This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have been several times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2011 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.

1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner.The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal.