ROSAMOND S. KING is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist. She is the author of the critical book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. She is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College.
“Because bodies are not rocks but get weighed down by them when
tossed into the ocean to drown. Because bodies are not consumed by
mouths but are covered in salty sweat and can be beaten like meat.
Because bodies have mouths but can not always speak without being
stoned and sometimes the mouths make the wrong shapes and so the
bodies become demons then ghosts then demons then ghosts again.
Because the bodies wash up on the shore and wash up still. Because
all things that are life become death like water or salt or stone
or rock or other bodies and when not all the bodies fit together
huddled on the rock, and so as some bodies cling to the hard
surface with their bruised fingers and open mouths, other bodies
shove those bodies off, without blinking, because blinking would be
memory, and here, in the unraveling hardness and conjuration of
demons, memory is not always honest and words are not always
true.”—Janice Lee
“King (Island Bodies), an accomplished scholar and performer, opens
her formally daring verse debut with a version of “My Bonnie Lies
over the Ocean,” recasting it to address Afro-Caribbean diasporas,
and starring Yoruba deities Eshu, Oshun, and Ogun. “My brawn it
belongs to the Ogun/ my blood it flows into the sea/ the two meet
inside a black body/ and whisper you fight to be free,” runs
one of several verses before the newly meaningful call to “Bring/
Back.” It is representative of several defining elements of the
book, among them a deep engagement with history and mythology, a
sense of play, and formal techniques that require the reader to
hear—not just read—the poem...King uses English while writing
beyond and against the bounds of its conventions, and also to
foreground the speaking, hearing body—and importantly, the black,
queer, female body—as the site where language originates and
lands.”—Publishers Weekly
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