The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs

Author: Marcia Douglas

Publisher: New Directions (2025)

A startling new dream-like vision of Jamaica―a work of surreal poetic fiction, lavishly studded with ecological prayers, drawings, and footnotes about healing herbs, disappearing flora-fauna, and buried herstories―by Whiting Award winner Marcia Douglas

Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’ “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Her new poetic and eco-spiritual book carries further the cultural preservation so central to Douglas’ vision. TheShante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters―all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant’s struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter/poem opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And, each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica.