Crossroads and Unholy Water

Marilene Phipps's poetry invites the reader to share sharp slices of Caribbean experience: Haiti is both stage and backdrop for people who move in various strata of the social scheme and through the three stages of life, in lieu of answers to the Sphinx's riddle. Through voices, nostalgic and tender, denouncing and shrill, we journey to a mythologizing Caribbean land populated with people whose dramatic intensity and fights for life are turned into sometimes funny, sometimes disquieting, and always richly evocative, palpable poetry.

Marilene Phipps is a poet and a painter who was born and grew up in Haiti. The 1993 Grolier Poetry Prize winner, she has been both a Guggenheim and Harvard University Bunting Institute fellow. She has won fellowships for the year 1999-2000 at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and the Center for the Study of World Religions, both at Harvard. Her poetry has been anthologized in Beacon’s Best of 1999.