BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS
Love, Loss & Becoming
ABOUT THIS WORK
A poetry collection about the selves we become through love, loss, memory and survival. Written across two tongues, it brings adult Shelly-Ann into conversation with earlier versions of herself without turning the past into something neat or easily resolved.
Some experiences change us loudly. Others become part of us so gradually that we only recognise them when we look back.
Love, Loss & Becoming is a poetry collection about those changes.
Moving through love, absence, childhood, memory, grief, longing, survival and the complicated work of becoming, the poems speak from different points along one life rather than from the safety of a perfectly resolved ending.
The collection moves between English and Jamaican language because both belong to the voice telling the story. Neither is decoration, translation for effect or proof of where the writer comes from.
At its centre is a conversation between who we were, what happened to us and who we are still becoming.
Not every loss becomes a lesson.
Not every earlier self disappears.
Some remain with us.