Three poems from Sonia’s forthcoming poetry collection “The Best Estimation in the World” have been published in the second issue of PREE under the theme “under pressure:”

“if you find yourself
in a room filled with nothing
that’s when we can talk about it

the little refuge of the school uniform

I could explain
how small the practice is
of being in the Bahamas

the killers it hides in its midst
are really teachers
who preach the Bible
via law school dreams

poor little robot

you want to walk around
the ruins of the property
and you want to discover things

you want to see
you are a wonderful gentleman

but you are not
Explorer people

your whole life
cooking in a prison
the ultimate rebrand
of this tropical rosary”

– An except from “Becoming the Candidate: (This Is Not) an Interview with the Managing Director of Luxury”

In her Letter from the Editor, “Prefiguring the 21st C in Caribbean Writing”, PREE editor-in-chief Annie Paul said:

“A total of 53 submissions were received from a wide swathe of the Caribbean (Aruba, Barbados, Guyana, Grenada, Dominica, St Kitts, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and even Belize), the diasporas and beyond. A little over half made it into this issue. Interestingly there were several submissions from the Bahamas which seems to generate excellent writing. Pressure is explored from a variety of viewpoints. Several works dwell on last year’s devastating hurricanes, and sexual abuse. There are discourses of citizenship, Afrofuturism, of race, class, colour, religion, gender. crime and sexuality. The texts cover a wide range from ecological critique to transnational solidarity, stories, poems, essays and artwork probing the contingency of everything ’from the human vessel to the allegorical ship’, covering all kinds of subjects from atmospheric pressure to baking contests to spirituality, sovereignty, freedom and unfreedom…

…Sonia Farmer’s three poems repeatedly plumb the shallow depths of the tourism product that has enveloped the Caribbean as surely as the sargasso that now invades it. Commodification reigns supreme, ‘even the way I think is a product.'”

Read the poems here.