Mitchell, Susan

The poems belonging to this collection are descriptive and largely image-driven. Focusing on moments of ecstasy, and written in a fragmented and highly tactile language, these poems re-present experience as a visual and aural texture or surface, one that is rough and raised: a mosaic that is sensually, emotionally, and sexually urgent that my reader might run his or her hands and ears over; I want the experience for both speaker and reader to feel that immediate. The final poem or arrangement of images is suggestive and ambiguous in order to create a sense of engagement with the mysterious, strange, terrific, tumultuous, uncertain, severe, and divine: all that comprises the ecstatic. Inherent in the ecstatic (or in states of ecstasy) are the possibilities for renewed, enlightened vision, transcendence, and transformation. These poems approach various moments that suggest the possibilities for such and present-to the reader---as the title suggests---an outline offering the general features of a given subject or emotion, encouraging the reader to fill in (or feel in) the details of the experience.

The poems of this collection attempt to bridge and break interpretive and formal borders. The speaker's voice is sometimes cohesive, sometimes fragmented. The title alludes to images in the poems: to the sea, the stars, storms, and of navigations not so much of specific places, but of motion or directions that are often tenuously connected or abstract. These poems are explorations, wonderings, and experiments. The speaker's voice shifts like the wind, sometimes leading toward a destination and other times remaining lost. The poems require navigation as the reader is called upon to engage in the process of finding the way---of making way---and participating with the poet in the process of meaning making.

It is my hope that readers of Bittersweet Desire join the narrator on his quest for romantic satisfaction. By putting a cynical twist on romantic movements and techniques, I feel readers will have an easier time identifying with the speaker presented in this manner. The speaker's cynicism is a result of losing the one he believed he loved and who he also believed loved him. This leads him to question his situation. The poems mirror his quest to define love and find someone to fit his new definition.

Behind Dasheen Leaves is a collection of poems that is challenged by the resonance of the Caribbean post-colonial voice. It is a challenge that this collection brazenly battles, as it avoids exoticizing the work, while it submerges the reader in cultural representations. The poems are manifestations of religious syncretism, multiculturalism, and feminist ideas. Behind Dasheen Leaves affects the reader by depicting the products of colonialism while evoking human emotions and experiences. The characters in this collection experience loss, and they struggle with the inability to define self in a society of miscegenation and assimilation. The syncretistic nature of the poems and the lives of the speakers within the poems force the reader to define self in respect to religion, culture, and other societal components evident in the work. Behind Dasheen Leaves normalizes the universe (for its characters, readers, and of course for its writer) as it serves as an emotional, linguistic, and vivid retention of what can no longer be described as lost heritage or history.