Utter

Exploring a universe where anything can happen, because there is nothing that can’t be imagined and there’s no connection between different experiences that can’t be made, Utter breaks down old boundaries: between the past and present, between human and animal, animate and inanimate, between the Caribbean and the global elsewhere, between the experienced world and the world of books. Vahni Capildeo rarely appears to speak in her own voice but creates a whole range of striking and sometimes mysterious personas; in the dialogue among the voices in the poems, a way of seeing, multifarious as it is, begins to emerge. The poems express a view that finds much in the world that is unjust, cruel, corrupt, and hypocritical but also finds moments of community and tenderness; there is darkness and there is humor, and sometimes the latter seems the only possible response to the former.