Author

Shivanee Ramlochan’s poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards. Her characters are variously described as soldier, thaumaturge, surgeon and much else, and her speakers live in a world that is located somewhere between the fantastic and the ordinary, everyday world of school buses, home chores and domesticity.