The Sea Needs No Ornament / El mar no necesita ornamento

Thirty-three poets from the English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean offer poems in a variety of forms and styles from free verse, formal, experimental, and exuberant to minimalist employing a range of language registers, including borrowings from children's ring games to blues rhythms. They speak in equally varied voices: lyrical, ironic, incensed, carnivalesque, meditative, and transgressive. Poems range over all aspects of women's lives, from childhoods of joy or sorrow, relationships with men and women, motherhood, elder years, as part of collectivities or in solitude. Poems focus on the female body as a source of self-knowledge, pleasure, strength, blood, invasion, and sometimes abuse. As Caribbean women, these poets scrutinize their places in the region's history and geography, including the intergenerational impact of migration; they celebrate or cast a critical eye over its spiritual traditions; decry the inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexuality; observe the region's abundance of flora, fauna and supernatural beings; and lament the catastrophic natural forces of earthquake, flood and hurricane that have battered its peoples, who yet search for new ways to revive and move forward.