The MAY issue of BookIsh Plaza eZine is out now!
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BOOKISH PLAZA eZINE nr.51 May 2016
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The MARCH issue of BookIsh Plaza eZine is out now!
BookIsh Plaza is your online bookshop for Caribbean literature.
In this issue:
BOOKISH PLAZA eZINE nr.49 MARCH 2016
Visit BookIsh Plaza for our new arrivals!
Papiamento is crossing borders as of 2008 with the poems by poet/writer Quito Nicolaas.
For a long time the author Quito Nicolaas is publishing his poems in Aruba, Holland and other islands in the Kingdom. Nearly in all local papers his poems were published for a wide range of reader. Like in the Caribbean he also performed on different stages in Holland with his Papiamento poems, explaining the content of his work.
The last decade he is also being recognised on the international level. As of 2008 his Papiamento crossed the borders and captivated the hearts of other peoples who lost their hearts to the idyllic life of Aruba, its nature, its lovely people and the dreams for the future. That year a haiku of the author came out in Albania in the magazine Haik Albania. China also was interested in his works and in 2009 ‘Scultura di Santo’, one of his poems, was published in The Dictionary of International Contemporary Poets. Not much later Revista Biografia from Brazil wanted to publicize his poem ‘Encuentro’ among others.
Canada was the next country in 2011 who publicized the poem ‘Deseo/Desire’ in the ezine World Poetry Reading Series. Argentine was next in 2013 and in the anthology Arte Poética; Antología Internacional de Poesía, two poems ‘Paisaje Lirico’ and ‘Pintura Corporal’ translated into Spanish by Ramon Todd Dandaré, were published.
This year (2014) Poems for the Hazara: A Multilingual Poetry Anthology was published which has two poems by the author, namely ‘Conversation’ and ‘Betrayal’. And not long ago the magazine Margutte from Italy asked the author if they can publish his poems. One of the poems ‘Malvinas’ was translated into Italian.
In this way our maternal language Papiamento and our literature crossed the Caribbean border and travelled the world where peoples of Europe, Asia, North- and South America took notice of them. Not only were these continents introduced to the poetic art of this Aruban poet, but they also got to know the island of Aruba and our maternal language of Papiamento.
The works of Quito Nicolaas can be found at BookIsh Plaza.
Photo: I. de Cuba
The Aruban poet Jermin Bell will be making his debut tomorrow at the Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (library).
The poetry book will be soon available @ BookIsh Plaza
In the newest BookIsh Plaza Ezine of 2013 an interview with HALA in Holland, a young group of Aruban poets challenging the spoken and the written word in the Netherlands. Furter on much more bookish news.
Enjoy the reading.
Read it @ BookIsh Plaza Ezine nr 12, JAN 2013
BookIsh Plaza has a page on facebook with new and interesting Caribbean books in diverse lanuanges, an agenda and pictures of events.
Do like the page if your into books.
Click on BookIsh Plaza Facebook Page & like it!
GREATBAY/MARIGOT, St. Martin (May 28, 2012)—“Imagining the St. Martin Nation” in two books by Lasana M. Sekou was the subject of a pre-book fair discussion taking place at Philipsburg Jubilee Library on Tuesday, May 29, from 7:30 pm – 9 pm.
“A panel of experts discussed the St. Martin people, identity, nationhood and notions of sovereignty as explored in Sekou’s short stories and poetry,” said Jacqueline Sample of House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP).
The experts or discussants were Dr. Rhoda Arrindell, linguist, researcher, educator (St. Martin), Emilio Jorge Rodríguez, author, essayist, scholar (Cuba), and Dr. Maria van Enckevort, historian, researcher, educator (St. Martin).
The books that got the critical treatment were Brotherhood of the Spurs (on the 15th anniversary of its publication), and The Salt Reaper, the critically reviewed poetry collection.
The general public was both invited to attend and encouraged to participate in the discussion of the ideas and books that some of them might have read, said Shujah Reiph, coordinator of the 10th annual St. Martin Book Fair.
Both books by the St. Martin author were published nearly 10 years apart. Have there been any changes in direction in the St. Martin reality or in the author’s two works? Are any of the dreams in the books being fulfilled in the St. Martin of today? “These are some of the questions that were going to be addressed, said Reiph.
It was Reiph who came up with the idea “to put the two books under a critical hard stare in plain view for all to interact with the discussion,” said Sample. This may be the first time that a St. Martin literary text will be so discussed on the island.
The reader of selections of both titles was Marie Richardson, assistant principal at St. Dominic School.
The 10th annual St. Martin Book Fair will take place on May 31 – June 2,2012, and opens at Belair Community Center on Thursday at 8 pm.
The St. Martin Book Fair is organized by Conscious Lyrics Foundation and HNP in collaboration with St. MaartenTourist Bureau, the Ministry of Education & Culture (MECSY), the Collectivity of St. Martin, and the University of St. Martin.
For book fair updates visit The St. Martin Book Fair site
Brotherhood of the Spurs The Salt Reaper National symbols of St. Martin
All these books are available @ BOOKISH PLAZA
Our new BookIsh Plaza Ezine May issue is out with interesting news for the upcoming Summer Season. Catch up on your reading during the Summer. Especially for you we compiled a Summer Fiction Reading List. There is also news on Summer events where BookIsh Plaza will be coming to you with books. So come meet & greet us. We hope you enjoy reading the ezine.
Check it out BookIsh Plaza Ezine nr 6, MAY 2012
The BookIsh Plaza Team
THE LECTURE WILL BE IN THE DUTCH LANGUAGE!
“Your mango ripe?”
Grandma stop feeling and squeezing up me fruit.
You aren’t playing in no band.
Me mango ain’t no concertina.’
– Amryl Johnson, Granny in de Market Place
In celebration of Black History Month the British Library has released a new 2-CD set, Caribbean Roots, featuring some of the most significant Caribbean and black British poets of the past several decades reading their own work. The 2-CD anthology features recordings first issued by the British Library on cassette over twenty years ago, together with previously unissued live performances.
Poets include Linton Kwesi Johnson, E A Markham, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, David Dabydeen, Amryl Johnson, James Berry, John Agard, Grace Nichols, Benjamin Zephaniah and Michael Smith.
The poets share a range of experiences, emotions, and influences, reflecting both the culture of the Caribbean and life as a black person in Britain.
Read full article @ Uk Black Writers Board
GREAT BAY, St. Martin (December 11, 2011)—The first semester of the 2011-2012 academic year is winding down with exams and book reports. And one student has something to say about one of the books that her class had to study this semester at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad & Tobago.
“Nativity should be implemented as a text because it illustrates the shaping of Caribbean culture and identity,” said Kelita Stewart recently.
The undergraduate student was talking about Nativity/Nativité/Natividad by Lasana M. Sekou – her experience with the book and exchanges among her classmates.
By Jacqueline Sample
“Nativity was utilized in the Course Foun1101 Caribbean Civilisation,” said Dr. John Campbell, the course lecturer at UWI’s St. Augustine campus.
The students were required to read, discuss, and write an end-term paper about the Nativity long poem by the St. Martin writer, studied a tone of the region’s premier institutions of higher learning.
The Caribbean Civilization class is taken by students majoring in disciplines ranging from political science to banking and finance. The course is offered on more than one UWI campus.
Nativity “will allow students to appreciate the evolution of the region out of colonialism which is deeply rooted,” said Stewart, an International Relations (Bsc) major.
To Campbell, himself a scholar, and other proponents of Caribbean Civilization studies such as Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, the field for study stretches from pre-Columbian influences to projecting concepts about the very futures that the peoples of the region are determined to build.
The UWI foundation (Foun1101) course may scratch the vast surface but it gives ambitious insights into an exciting area of study emerging in and about the Caribbean region – and may even include what some are calling the Caribbean Diaspora. (This is probably a new name for George Lamming’s term of the region’s “external frontiers.”)
An epic poem like Nativity maybe Sekou’s attempt at an ambitious poem.
In the nine-strophes of Nativity the poet brazenly draws relationships into and from the region, exposes critical details and references. Not even children’s games, Santo Domingo jumbie names, Chinese immigrants, Indian indentured, or “the battery flesh of Brimstone Hill labor” (page 13)are immune from his “journeying” pen strokes.
Sekou shoots out this “bare” globe-hopping data as verse, as if from the Great Salt Pond, “through barren wilds of fields & foundries” (Nativity, page 1).
“Hopefully the UWI students were exposed to interpreting aspects of the elements that Nativity chronicles, elemental to and generative of the peoples, cultures, histories, politics, geographies, and economies that are forging our Caribbean civilization,” said Sekou.
UWI describes the 3-credit course as one “designed to develop an awareness of the main process of cultural development in Caribbean societies, highlighting the factors, … that have fed the emergence of Caribbean identities. To develop a perception of the Caribbean as wider than island nations or linguistic blocs. To stimulate students’ interest in, and commitment to Caribbean civilization and to further their self-determination.”
So is Nativity, with its English, French, and Spanish versions in the one book, along with its extensive glossary, a fitting poem for such a fundamental course? Canadian researcher and author Afua Cooper seems to think so: “If I were to choose a text to teach the African Diaspora, it would be Nativity because it opens up multiple poetic portals into the vast dimension of Black people and their life story.”
“Nativity can be used in courses on poetry, literature, culture, history, anthropology, ethnography, writing, politics, mathematics, religion, romance, performance, dance, architecture, maritime studies, environmental studies, and science.”
“It can also be used as a reference to tell the intersectional global story of Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia,” wrote Cooper in her introductionto the trilingual edition of Nativity.
Professor Conrad James used Nativity in 2010, as a required text in his Latin American and Caribbean Studies class at the University of Birmingham, England.
According to James, “Nativity is a quintessentially Caribbean work. It is partly this commitment to understanding the Caribbean in regional rather than narrow national terms, which accounts for the brilliant erudition of the text” by Sekou.
Buy NATIVITY/NATIVITE/NATIVIDAD @ BOOKISH PLAZA
Rubber Orchestras is a new collection by Trinidadian–born British poet Anthony Joseph, released this month by Salt Publishing. It is also the title of Joseph’s third album with The Spasm Band, which was released earlier this year.
Taking its name from a poem by American surrealist Ted Joans, Rubber Orchestras is an energetic, sensuous and intriguing collection of poems, written over a period of four years with an (as yet) undisclosed method of composition the writer calls Liminalism. This collection was selected from 100 poems written using this method. This is the poets’ most radical work so far, in parts psychedelic, surrealist but always engaging. [. . .] The book is divided into three sections: Precious and Impossible — a selection of poems influenced in subject and style by calypso and jazz; The Colony of Light — poems concerning Caribbean history and society; and Grotesquerie, in which there are darker, more obscure poems.
Read full article @ Repeating Islands
The BookIsh Plaza Team is proud to announce that our very first BookIsh Plaza Ezine is out; the new ezine on (Caribbean) literature, poetry and non fiction books. This ezine will be coming out each month with interesting books and news on the (Caribbean) bookfront. In this issue we have news of a booklaunch coming up this week, new arrived books at BookIsh Plaza, the developments around the novel Verborgen leegte, the upcoming UniArte Expo, in depth poetry in Spiel di mi Alma and much more.
We are sure you’ll enjoy our first issue. Do let us know what you think of this new ezine, by sending us an e-mail at info@bookishplaza.com.
Next month we’ll be bringing you a special issue for the Christmas Season.
Feel free to pass the ezine on to persons who may be interested.
If you want to subscribe to our ezine, send an e-mail to info@bookishplaza.com
Check out the ezine here BookIsh Plaza Ezine nr 1 nov. 2011
The BookIsh Plaza Team
New Book: “Cadáver de bailarina”Described as “a disturbing collection of poems, ideal to read before going to the bed (or the grave),” Cadáver de bailarina y otros poemas [Body of a Dancer and other poems] (Lulu, 2011) is a new book by Rosalina Martínez González.
Description: A dancer who returns from death to complete the mise-en-scène. Centuries-old night owls meditate about their craft: blood; oriental spirits who tell of their adventures from the body of their victims, and conversations with more or less famous dead people. Cadáver de bailarina y otros poemas reflects on various phenomena surrounding the death, dark feelings and emotions contained from the perspective of the beings that take center stage. A collection of poems of improbable post-mortem experiences, ideal to read before going to bed (or the grave).
Read full article @ Repeating Islands
BookIsh Plaza just received two books by the Aruban poet Rosabelle Illes. Her latest is called Spiel di mi Alma [Mirror of my soul] (2010) in Papiamento* where she reflects on society, her own role and appeal to others to make the step for change. Her poetry are made to be performed. That is what she also does.
Last year at the book launch of Spiel di mi Alma it was a complete performance using different disciplines of the art. See an impression of the night @ eneryvibes’s blog The book is beautifully illustrated by different contemporary young artists.
* Papiamento/u is the language spoken on the islands of Aruba, Curaçao & Bonaire.
BookIsh Plaza also has her debut poetry book Beyond Insanity that is written in English. In this publication she explores the state of being insane and beyond that. What are the limits if you go there. It’s all about letting go and explore the unknown borders of the mind. The book is richly illustrated by one of the finest contemporary artists of Aruba, Nigel Matthew.
Rosabelle Illes is currently studying psychology and a minor in creative writing in The Netherlands.
Both works are available now @ Bookish Plaza
Watch the introductory text to the book entitled Spiel di mi Alma, performed by Rosabelle Illes.
BookIsh Publishers is delighted to announce that two poems by poet/writer Quito Nicolaas were published in Chinese and English in The World Poets Quarterly, vol. 57, february 2010 of China. The two poems are Ignorance II and Sand Sculpture.
Poetry books by the author like Gerede Twijfels/Reasonable Doubt (in Dutch & English) and his latest Bos pa Planta [Constructing Voices] (in Papiamento, English & Dutch) are available at BookIsh Plaza
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