When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to keep his way pure?

Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song?

But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?

""Throughout the collection, Dawes captures the many dimensions of reggae from the psalmic to the prophetic that are yet to be explored by other writers and musicians. Reggae remains unparalleled in its ability to absorb other influences and remain true to itself and to capture beauty, pain, and pleasure in a one-drop riddim. Its syncopation suggests a break, a gap - somewhere to fall with the faith that you will be caught - and this is what gives reggae its redemptive value. To really enjoy the music, you must believe. The same could be said of Shook Foil.""
Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.

Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, The Pain Tree is Olive Senior at her very best, unforgettable short stories set in Jamaica and Canada, now available in this beautiful UK and Caribbean edition from Peepal Tree Press.

Olive Seniors new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is  along with her characteristic gossipy voice  reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.

While most of the stories operate within a realist mode, Senior also exploits traditional motifs. Collected here are revenge stories (The Goodness of my Heart), a bargain with the Devil (Boxed-in), a Cinderella story (The Country Cousin), a magical realist interpretation of African spiritual beliefs (Flying) and a narrators belated acceptance of the healing power of traditional beliefs (The Pain Tree). Coal is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Seniors trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking Moonlight and Silent to the girls in Lollipop and A Father Like That who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.

Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011.

When Winston receives a telegram informing him of his father's imminent death, his decision to return to Jamaica is very reluctant. The memories opened up by his return tell us why.

But twenty-five years in the USA without contact with his family has allowed mutual resentments to mature and trapped Winston in the traumas of his childhood. And when he discovers he has a half-sister no one has told him about, his fury knows no bounds. But it is Rosa, his father's outside child, who in the end offers Winston some focus for his feelings.

Told through the perspectives of Winston and his estranged brother, Septimus, the novel becomes the story of their attempts to heal the breach between them, and become the kind of men who might be able to sustain a loving relationship.

Powerful, absorbing, always moving and sometimes painfully funny, Patricia Powell's new novel seamlessly combines an intense psychological realism with magical elements that are no surprise to her characters, but will surprise and delight her readers. Tough and unsentimental as it is, the novel has much to say about the power of forgiveness and the possibility of transcending hurt.

Patricia Powell was born in Jamaica. She is the award winning author of three novels including A Small Gathering of Bones and The Pagoda. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Mills College in California.