Books
DREAMS OF DIASPORA
Full-length poetry collection (Release date: March 17, 2023 from Finishing Line Press)
Confronting the fragmented narratives of slavery and colonization in the Caribbean, DREAMS OF DIASPORA grapples with questions of place, belonging, and identity of the dispossessed. In scales both intimate and epic, probing the region's revolutionary and literary legacies, these poems wander the seas of the Americas, centering the roles of class, race, economics, and history in the decimation of Haiti and the migration of peoples around the globe. At once eulogy and song, DREAMS OF DIASPORA forges a new understanding of self for the Caribbean's decolonized, reframing what it means to be home.
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ADVANCE PRAISE
Dexterous and commanding, Dreams of Diaspora is a love song to those who move across oceans and borders, celebrating the revolutionary traditions of the Americas while acknowledging the ways in which the region is still marked by colonialism. Rancy recognizes the Black diaspora as an important vantage point, one that allows us to see in many directions, including the ancestral past and a decolonized future. With language both searing and delicate, Dreams of Diaspora is revelatory and prescient.
— Desiree C Bailey, author of WHAT NOISE AGAINST THE CANE, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and National Book Awards Finalist
S.K. Rancy's exquisite poem-explosions are so many wide-open windows onto the contradictions of a deeply diasporic Black American life. Full at once with fury and with hope, these are stories told by one who knows and feels this country intimately, but still sits / sits still just outside its subtle borders – living, observing at a distance not-quite-safe. To read Rancy's words is to sit with him and feel, too, how the spiral of shared history simmers beneath every moment of our divided present. His work is a gentle proposition for healing in a reimagined time-space of home.
— Kaiama L. Glover, PhD, author; translator; co-editor; Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College of Columbia University; and awardee of PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation
Dreams of Diaspora undoes Ralph Ellison’s borrowed phrase “I yam what I yam”. Here, a Black man knows himself and his ancestry, and he knows that his people can fly. These poems live urgently and always through exquisite music—I shutter between many subjects, not the least of which are the Black/immigrant experience, Fanon, Odysseus, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This book sirens me to walk barefoot on flooded asphalt, somewhere between my past and present. Dreams of Diaspora montages within my mind—I want to dream onward.
— CM Burroughs, Professor of Poetry at Columbia College Chicago and author of MASTER SUFFERING, longlisted for the National Book Award, and THE VITAL SYSTEM
Dreams of Diaspora is an evocative and wide-ranging exploration of the dreams of the past and present of the black Atlantic diaspora shaped by the history and trauma of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the Americas. Written in taut yet rich poetic language, this collection of poems is in deep conversation with an essential lineage of Caribbean intellectuals and writers, including Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, among others. While Rancy’s collection has strong roots in the Caribbean, particularly in Haiti and its revolutionary history, it traces a broader Caribbean diasporic trajectory that makes home in “La Florida” and finds its way to Brooklyn, New York…. These Caribbean dislocations emerge out of a history of exile, violence, and imperialism that cannot be forgotten, as these poems insist, and deftly connect to present-day racism and anti-black police violence in the U.S. and ongoing economic dependence and inequality in the Caribbean… S.K. Rancy’s Dreams of Diaspora takes us from the past to the present and back, from Jacmel to Flatbush Avenue, giving an urgent Caribbean diasporic poetic voice to those “still begging to be free.”
— Maja Horn, PhD, Professor of Spanish & Latin American Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University
Cover art: “Tropical Convention with Head 2,” Edouard Duval-Carrié (2021)