Difficult Fruit [Paperback]

A collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge—of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world—this offering from Trinidadian poet Lauren Alleyne grapples with personal experience. The poems form a lyric memoir of the author’s life, chronicling a journey that includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. The central poem, “Eighteen,” which narrates the aftermath of sexual assault, and another, “Thirty,” which addresses the virtues of self-reliance, are representative of several poems of age that both chronicle and disrupt time, looking at the speaker’s past as a way to understand the present. These poems are a movement through fracture—both necessary and unwarranted—toward wholeness and transformation. This debut collection introduces a striking new voice in poetry.