The Relevance of Lustrously Colorful Dreams

Page 10 American Book Review Kalantzis continued from previous page up fields to fierce gardens.” And later on mocks W. H. Auden, that he “vouches / for the painting,” and he himself “gets it / wrong.” Not all of the poems, of course, deal directly with their writers’ “Greekness .” Many of the personal poems are infused by salty Greek humor. Hilary Sideris certainly retains that humor. Of “Sex” she writes, I like mine from a can, product of Greece, Portugal, Spain, odor & shimmer when I lock my office, pull the E-Z open tab & spatter calendar, curriculum! I could go on and on pulling quotes from the book. But it’s not practical, and it certainly isn’t fair. There are many good poets and many good poems in Pomegranate Seeds. Many readers not familiar with Greek-American poets will still recognize certain names, like Eleni Sikelianos.And many other poets, less known, populate this anthology and do both themselves and each other great justice with strong and fiercely “new” poetry that is often and stunningly beautiful, funny, sad, hopeful. That is what’s most remarkable about the book—its variety. If you don’t take to one particular poet, turn the page; there are forty-eight more of them—each one balancing (in his or her own way) on the hyphen, as if it were less a bridge than a seesaw. Dimitrios Kalantzis was born and raised in Brooklyn in a predominately Italian neighborhood. He currently lives and works in Chicago. the Relevance of Lustrously Colorful Dreams emily Raboteau In his editorial preface to Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, activist Thomas Glave describes how difficult it was to get this anthology published. Several presses rejected it on the grounds that the project was too “narrow” and therefore without appeal. I cannot imagine anyone judging a book about say, Asian art, in the same way. Since this groundbreaking embarrassment of riches is just that broad, I can only say to those in the publishing world who continue to think of the Caribbean as little more than a tourist playground and queer life as too fringe to be of interest to readers, “Shame on you.” In myriad and multiple forms, Our Caribbean’s thirty-seven contributors (representing the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, Suriname, and Trinidad) give resounding voice to the often-invisible Caribbean experience and the often silenced queer experience within it, giving purchase to William Carlos Williams’s assertion that the local is universal. Many of the authors in this volume are actually writing from outside the Caribbean, whether from the vantage point of migration or exile. A common theme among their pieces is a longing for home. In her essay “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?”, Achy Obejas writes with complexity and humor about her opportunistic father’s refusal to let her return to their homeland. The narrator of R. Erica Doyle’s charming Brooklynbased story, “Tante Merle,” is connected to Trinidad through language and food.Anton Nimblett’s, “Time and Tide,” concerns the quest for “home” (also Trinidad ) as a center for the narrator to make sense of his messy life after a car accident in New York frightens him into questioning his choices. “[H]ome was a far way off, a place I had never been to but knew well out of my mother’s mouth,” lusts Audre Lorde for Grenada in an excerpt from her famous biomythography , Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). These are among the collection’s most poignant offerings in their acute expression of displacement and yearning. Shani Mootoo, of East Indian descent, richly describes Trinidad’s multiculturalism in her colorful story, “Out on Main Street.” Frustrated with the clerk at the Indian sweetshop who has snubbed her for not knowing the right name for koorma, the narrator says to her girlfriend, “Cultural bastards, Janet, cultural bastards . Dat is what we is. Yuh know, one time a fella from India who living up here call me a bastardized Indian because I didn’t know Hindi. And...