Providencia

Here's What People Are Saying

“There is a lot to admire in this debut, including the wide formal range, ambitious scope, mythic power, and fascinating narrative. However, what I love the most about these autobiographically inspired poems is the way the “I” is made up of an extraordinarily complicated recipe of history, geography, race, class, will, and chance. In Forbes’s quest, you will find personal poems that strike with resounding social significance, as well as poems that survey a sometimes gentle and sometimes violent historical landscape with visceral intimacy.” ~Jonathan Andersen, author of Stomp and Sing (2005)

In the vein of Jamaica Kincaid, PROVIDENCIA is a kaleidoscopic journey home to a very small place, an island that may appear tiny on a map but contains a whole world of feelings unto itself. PROVIDENCIA is a place where a child’s cornrows become a map to hidden treasure chests, where pirates are haunted by the enslaved men they slew, and where beautiful women walk long dirt roads in heels, heads held high, to deliver telegraphic warnings to their absent, adulterous husbands. One hears all kinds of sirens in this book; those that screech on the streets of Brooklyn, those that tempt men who love men, those that sound warnings from a conch shell, and those that lure sailors to their deaths in wine dark seas. With a yearning untainted by sentimentality, Forbes gracefully scribes his/our Caribbean diasporic family history in his debut book.” ~Lisa Sánchez González, author of The Stories I Read to the Children, The Life and Writing of Pure Belpré (2013)

“Sean Frederick Forbes’ poems are a luxurious blending of the exotic with the mundane, creating a world that is simultaneously familiar but tinged with a mild surrealism, a world just out of reach, but in clear focus, populated with a grandfather who demonstrates what it is to be a man, a brother born with no fingernails, a father who searches the Viet Nam of his living room shag carpet for mines, where pirates invade PROVIDENCIA and loot and sometimes conceal private treasures. The absolute beauty of these poems is the self-confronting journey of a man who seeks to discover where he came from, to unravel who he is. Forbes is a master surgeon whose steady hand and sculptured incisions are not only precise, but inventive, extracting parts of our bodies and souls we did not even know existed. While these poems show a grace and meticulous awareness of form, where nothing is superfluous, they are also paradoxically raw and gut wrenchingly tinged with an honest humanity and a voice like no one else writing today; it is as though we were privy to conversations while listening with our ears to walls. These are poems anchored in the heartbreak of human longing but not void of hope, and like the theory of a lightning bolt arbitrarily connecting with a single mutated cell, these poems create a life form that never seen before, where the characters are half dreamlike and half human. I am compelled to give this book my highest compliment: these unpretentious poems invite and demand that I return to them over and over again.” ~Bruce Cohen, author of Placebo Junkies Conspiring with the Half-Asleep (2012)

“In PROVIDENCIA, Sean Forbes presents poetry that is rich in a kind of spare aesthetics. Spare, as in clear, as in extra and its opposite, sparingly, as in leave uninjured, as in can-you-spare-a-dime yes, especially that sense of provide. In the “Bone” sequence, a retelling of a folktale, the reader is drawn into parallel worlds of family violence as devastating as they are fascinating. In “The Map to the Pirate’s Treasure Is Woven into the Women’s Hair,” Forbes provides an historical retelling that weaves cultures and centuries. A marvelous debut collection. ~Kimiko Hahn, author of Toxic Flora: Poems (2010)