Synopses & Reviews
Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.
Review
"Generous with grief and sweetness. . . . Simplicity isn’t easy and honesty is harder, but McCallum’s verse and voice are completely honest. These are poems you cannot turn down."
--Carol Frost
Review
“Rich with imagery, with longing, memory, and self-assertion.”
--Hubbub
Review
"In these spare, sensuous, and lyrical poems, McCallum seeks to explore love and loss by navigating the bridge which joins the one to the other."
Maurya Simon
Review
"Opens a whole new world. . . . Reading this book is testament to the sustaining fire of poetry."
Ray González
Review
McCallum dances along the brink of experience with a taut and maturing lyricism that seizes the breath and lifts the word into flight. Writing of family and community in her native Jamaica, she gives the sense of the music of the place, a culture steeped in the singularity of a rich patois and spirituality, McCallum emerges with an evocation that is celebratory. . . . balances the hard sobriety of elegiac whisperings with the whimsy of myth and folk characters.”
-Afaa M. Weaver, Osdidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora
About the Author
Shara McCallums first book, The Water Between Us, won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Born in Jamaica, she lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee.