Pepper Seed by Malika Booker

Shortlisted for the Poetry Prize for First Collection from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry

Malika Booker’s Pepper Seed is map and compass to a world of distinct yet interconnected landscapes. At home in a number of locales (Brooklyn, Brixton, Trinidad, Guyana, and Grenada) Booker trains a brave eye on the unspeakable and the unspoken. By turns bearing witness, to the interior lives of the characters that people her poems, and laying herself bare, conjuring an immediate and complex vision of the miraculous ordinary. 

Pepper Seed is a wind at the reader’s back. It tickles, whispers, prods and shouts as we are borne from one world to the next.