Salt-sweat & Tears – Louisa Adjoa Parker
ISBN: 9781910836491
£8.99
The poems bounce off the page like diamonds hard, right and lethal. Louisa Adjoa Parker writes like a fire blazes: what a commanding way to write I envy her! She writes as if she born to it brutal and cool; sparks fly. Her world is unignorable. It explodes in your face. She insists you listen. Her language is spot-on. She writes like a dream, but a dream that will not let you go; that’s ruthless and painful and crystal clear: 100% bold, 100% natural. Nothing escapes her, but her heart is a heart of gold. She shares her pain with a lightness of touch that makes it all the more heart-breaking. Poems with nerves of steel.
Selima Hill
Dreaming of skinheads
At night, I’d dream of being chased
by gangs of skinhead men,
and my Afro, like a soft foam ball,
would seem bigger in the darkness
as the stamp of their
Doc-Martened feet
came closer.
Author biography
Louisa Adjoa Parker writes poetry, fiction and black history. She is of White English and Ghanaian heritage. She has lived in the West Country for most of her life, and began writing poetry to explore her feelings of being “different”, and the racism and she experienced in her early years. Salt-sweat and Tears was Louisa’s first poetry collection, in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in a range of anthologies and magazines, including Envoi, Coffee-house Poetry, Wasafiri, Ouroboros, The Forward Book of Poetry 2008, and Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets. One of her poems was short-listed by the Bridport Prize. She has recently begun writing fiction and her stories have been anthologised and published in Toasted Cheese and PennyShorts. She is currently completing her first novel, which was long-listed by the Mslexia Novel Competition. Louisa has also written several books exploring the history of Black and Minority Ethnic people in Dorset.