Living Stone (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781806232482)

Yvonne Weekes has always been a capable poet, but in Living Stone she fully claims her project and her power. These are generous poems that refuse to withhold their metaphors from the reader. They not only observe a world of race and gender, of class and faith, that stretch between England, Montserrat, and Barbados, they sing that world and pray it into tenderness.

- Professor Kei Miller FRSI, an award-winning Jamaican poet, novelist, and essayist.

Living Stone is chilling and charming, sobering and refreshing. There's the carnivalesque as an answer to botheration and danger all around, and there's hope, after all. With a literary voice fusing the spoken and the scribal, Weekes offers insight into multi-layered Caribbean reality, where "There is a tourist sea and then there is our sea." Living Stone is also a poetic account of violence against women, of social decorum (as a buttress and as a burden), of embodied spiritual ideas, of ancestral memories, and of the painfully personal that is justifiably made public.

A timely book by the author of the critically acclaimed Volcano: A Memoir.

- Bartosz Wójcik, a Polish literary critic and a translator specialising in the cultures of the Caribbean.

Living Stone is an emancipational journey through three sonic movements of finely crafted poems. The collection is a grieving, a fear-facing remembering, a (re)sounding unsilencing, an emotional, untethered truth-telling; a courageous rolling away of various 'stones', chasing off jumbies and clearing webs, reminding us to reclaim and resurrect ourselves from past events, heal stone(d) hearts, so when death does eventually find us, we are living, full-filled, present and free.

- Celia A. Sorhaindo, author of Guabancex is a Dominican poet.

Living Stone is a powerful collection of poems which questions what it means to live as a poet, in the poem, and outside it, in a world of thick fact and even thicker memories. For Yvonne Weekes, although poetry promises some solace, it cannot quench the accumulation of daily dreams and griefs, or the inevitable sedimentation of desires and sorrows.

- Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón, Puerto Rican author, translator, editor.