Number 11 for National Poetry Month - National Botanical Gardens, 1986 by Roger Bonair-Agard (recording)

https://soundcloud.com/rogerbonair/national-botanic-gardens-1986

For my last entry for National Poetry Month, i indulge my own poetry.  This is the closing piece of my most recent collection, Bury My Cothes.  It is 16plus minutes long, and like collection’s opening piece blurs the lines between memoir, short story and poetry - the latter perhaps, only because it’s in a poetry collection.

There is some risk to toying with the idea of genre like this, except that the separations amongst genres are so often artificial and semantic.  The piece documents one of the last big events in my life in Trinidad before i emigrate to New York.  It is the story of a car crash and the attendant minor violences of my young life there, with a foreshadowing to some of the more significant violences Trinidad has come to know. The book is concerned with violence in African diasporic art and therefore, also, with the violences in my own life - those inflicted on me and by me.  It makes it a large book, as poetry collections go.

The book, my third, is my best effort so far i think.  It is certainly my most ambitious.  Give it a shot, my shameless self-promotion notwithstanding.  It is available from Haymarket Books (haymarketbooks.org) and in many fine bookstores.

Hope National Poetry Month was good to you.

rba

To schedule a reading or an appearance please contact Ofer Ziv at Blue Flower Arts at 845-677-8559 or email ofer@blueflowerarts.com. www.facebook.com/rogerbonairagard www.twitter.com/rogerbonair www.cypherbooks.com