Ground Provisions - Shauna M. Morgan

These poems grapple with ideas of heritage and inheritance: what we are given, what is taken away or lost, how we sustain life, and how we make provisions between generations—especially of women. Concerned with landscapes of the human body and the earth, the poems pull the reader into the experience of navigating the sensate world anew.

Taking us on a sensory journey across landscapes of the body and the earth, Ground Provisions traverses the natural world, moving from the Caribbean to North America, as it immerses readers in lush language and imagery that provoke questions about identity in the making of diasporas and the creation of multi-ethnic realities. What remains and what is created anew? What emerges at the fissures of culture? What is learned from human relationships with the natural world?

These poems want to interrogate power, the desire for freedom, the necessity of ancestral memory, and the need to touch the earth and each other. Walking us through a backabush Jamaican community to a hostile US environment, the collection explores family origins and Afro-Indo cultural syncretism.

Sonnets and sestina meet contemporary poetic forms poems such as the haibun, duplex, and ghazal to offer intimate views of the speakers and bring us into their interior lives. We witness grief overcoming the mind and body, children holding painful secrets, women leaning into sensuality, and families coming to terms with fracture and reconciliation.

Concerned with identity and personhood, the poems examine intertwined familial and historical inheritances and asks us to imagine the liberatory possibilities of establishing new roots with legacy seeds.