a poet's farewell

Books by Drisana Deborah Jack

The Rainy Season / Skin

* * * * *

a poet’s farewell

(for Sonya)

By Drisana Deborah Jack

you made me understand that

what we do

is more than clever crafting of words

and extended vocabularies

this is about touch

this is about telling

this is a bout of worship

this is about a soul in a rainstorm

the drowning of weeds

the nourishing of seeds

this is about a remembered gesture

an unconditional smile

an uncompromising will

* * * * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Drisana Deborah Jack was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1970, to Caribbean parents. As a child her parents brought her to St. Martin, her mother’s home island, where she was reared in Cole Bay village. Jack graduated from SUNY at Buffalo with an MFA in 2002 but by then had already co-founded and acted with the Teenage Acting Company while attending the MPC high school, and published her first poetry book, The Rainy Season (1997), in St. Martin.

She went on to exhibit her artwork in the Caribbean, the USA, Europe, and Japan. Jack, A Caribbean artist by “geography and cultural/spiritual location, constructs … a personal/cultural history based on ancestral or re-memory using painting, video, photography, sound art, and poetry.” Her poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and Calabash. Articles citing and reviewing her work have appeared in Today, The St. Maarten Guardian, Beurs- en Nieuwsberichten, Artpapers Journal, Buffalo News, and in Fabian Badejo’s Salted Tones – Modern Literature in St. Martin (2003).

Jack has recited her poetry and lectured on the cultural arts at readings and festivals such as No To The Franco-Dutch Treaty, CARIFESTA VI, VII, at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Miami Bookfair International, Crossing the Seas, Poetry Africa, and Tradewinds. A leading St. Martin poet and mother of one daughter, Jack is an assistant art professor at New Jersey City University.

Awards and honors include a Caribbean Writers Institute Fellow (UM), Prince Bernhard Culture Fund and New York Foundation for the Arts grants, SUNY Buffalo Dissertation Fellowship, Photography Institute fellow, Lightwork Artist-in-Residence (Syracuse University), CEPA Exhibition Award, and a US National Endowment for the Arts residency at Big Orbit Gallery. skin is Jack’s second book of poems.