A Black poet’s meditative, evocative journey to the Dutch Caribbean island Curacao, evoking slave experiences through historical remains, human memories, and his own associations with his native West Africa and current homes in Puerto Rico and Canada. The poetry is often graphic, with lines in Spanish, and shows parallels in landscape, food, and language between West Africa and the Caribbean.

“In this new collection, Kuwabong searches for a poetics resting in a cartographic sensibility. His poems bloom from islands, churn at continental coasts, exhaust the borders of the page, and arrange themselves in defiant architectures. Kuwabong’s lens is expansive, the historical record appears and recedes into an Atlantean ‘sea-salt of history’—but the overarching concern remains an ancestral sensibility, a deep investment on the lives gone before along the varied coasts of the Atlantic. The larger beauty of this work however, is in its interrogation of sound.”
—Richard Georges, Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

“Here’s a poetic sensibility that engages with the features encountered in nature and the myths they engendered—in Costa Rica, Curacao, and certainly the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, where Irma and Maria reincarnate Huracán and show who governs the land and water and every thing on or in it. These poems require more than the usual work that poetry demands of readers, but the extra effort is richly rewarded.”
—Nigel H Thomas, 2022 Winner of the Canada Council John Molson Prize for the Arts

“The poems in The Sargasso Sea Scrolls: Oficios de la memoria (Dated: 1843 Guadeloupe) have been in the process of being written for more than five hundred years. Having been chosen as their vehicle and scribe, Ghanaian Canadian poet Dannabang Kuwabong articulates a unique polyglossic poetics in dialectic energies of creation in an archipelago of language, images, and poetry… Memory inhabits the locus of poetry and the structures of language. Dannabang Kuwabong has given us poems that flow and move, constative and performative, into the future of Caribbean poetry.”
—Elidio La Torre Lagares, author of Cuerpos sin sombras and other works