Lighthouse

Epiphaneia

- Richard Georges

( Paperback )

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Winner of OCM Bocas Prize 2020

Georges renders the landscape of survival with rigorous integrity, unflinching clarity. An island browns in the sea, a boy beats a drum, tongues swell up with language. These poems are astonishing, largely unprecedented. Georges has written a truly living text.”– Kaveh Akbar

Set in the immediate aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, the most catastrophic storm to strike the British Virgin Islands, Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia stands as a collection of rich, transcendental verse. Beyond the loss and devastation that such a natural disaster brings, Georges’ ideas span beyond the physical world, asking us to consider the ways in which families and communities come together amidst such tragedy.

‘They say birds always find their way back home but home is a nowhere — a memory; a never was.’

Blood runs under the earth. A father will instruct his daughter to the hills where their ancestors are buried. A flying man opens a door in the sky. Children play in the twisted roots of a landscape both dangerous and triumphant. Constantly attuned to the devastating power of nature and where the body, too, is ‘a precarious house’, these poems are hymns to the resilience of the human spirit. Georges locates in the negative space of aftermath both the ghosts of history, and the mythic beginnings of a yet unlived, rejuvenated world.

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Richard Georges is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and GIANT (Platypus Press). He is the recipient of the 2016 Marvin E. Williams Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer, and has been shortlisted for The Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Small Axe Literary Prize, The Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His third collection of poems, Epiphaneia, is out in 0219 from Outspoken Press.