Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.

"Stunning debut collection"--Publishers Weekly starred review

"Reading (and rereading) Sinclair is an urgently necessary, absolutely unparalleled experience."--Diego Báez, Booklist starred review-- (9/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"This award-winning collection comes to eat you."--Waxwing Literary Journal

"Safiya Sinclair writes strange, mythological, gorgeously elaborate lyric poems, with a diction that is both arcane and contemporary. . . . Her language is distinctive, assured, and a marvel to read."--Cathy Park Hong, from her introduction to Safiya Sinclair in the Boston Review
-- (2/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Cannibal is nothing less than an entrancing debut that reveals the teeming intellect and ravishing lucidity of a young poet in full possession of her literary powers. Here is a poetry that richly interrogates power and history while also eloquently and furtively asserting the possibilities of nature, desire, and the body as ceremonial and spiritual sources of resistance and affirmation."--Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep-- (2/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"With exquisite lyrical precision, Safiya Sinclair is offering us a new muscular music that is as brutal as it is beautiful. Intelligent and elemental, these poems mark the debut of a poet who is dangerously talented and desperately needed."--Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things
-- (2/23/2016 12:00:00 AM)

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Pub date: 2016-09-01

Length: 126 pages