Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’s “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation). The Shante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters—all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica:

For things happen below sea that have never been told. There is wheelin there and turnin; and far-far down past brochure azure, cerulean and indigo, there is a vast dark ink and vortices of voices caught up in such a trumpet of rah-&-glory bottomsea sound as to move earth’s axis. And after that, more ink blue, and cobalt and sapphire and a calm-calm wata—velvet and kin to the moon brand new. The monk seals dare not go this far. But the spirits do.

BIO

Marcia Douglas was born in the UK, and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. The author of novels, poems, and essays, she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

REVIEWS

"The adventurous and immersive latest from Douglas, continues the author’s fusion of poetry and prose with a nonlinear tale combining an escape from slavery in 18th-century Jamaica and immigrant life in 2010s America… ‘Time and space are twin,’ Douglas writes, and as she develops this idea in passages that alternate from prose to verse, the novel takes on a trancelike quality. The author’s originality is on full display in this challenging and rewarding work." --Publishers Weekly

[P]  New Directions Publishing Corporation  /  April 22, 2025

1.0" H x 7.9" L x 5.3" W (0.6 lbs) 224 pages