waterpoem 5

Books by Drisana Deborah Jack

The Rainy Season / Skin

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waterpoem 5

By Drisana Deborah Jack

there is a sea inside me

sprawling wide

surface warmth

unplumbed depths

the embrace of oceans

is the love i know

new currents chilled by

the melting of icecaps

soothe equatorial temperatures

and still with the call of a sure horizon

i crash into your eroding shores

there is a sea inside me

witness to countless crimes

i carry evidence in my belly

Witness a flotilla of bodies

beached bloated blurred pixilated

adrift in a history still seeking remembrance

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posted 3 March 2006

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.