Straddling dimensions, geographies, and voices, this long-awaited debut poetry collection by Samantha Thornhill invites you to experience life through the intimate lens of a contemporary griot and oracle. Thornhill’s hybrid identity as a Trinidadian-American informs the sparkling originality of her verses that invite, delight, and ignite the imagination with their enchanting images and ideas.
Laced with imaginative odes to orcas, aprons, banana slugs, and darkness itself, in the tradition of Pablo Neruda, many of these vivid poems carry a dream-like quality, serving as symphonic missives to the cosmos. Shimmying through timelines and themes of a Caribbean childhood and US migration, coming of age, femininity, sexuality, the justice system and more, what prevails amidst these weightier conversations is a relentless buoyancy and commitment to a gratitude that skillfully, playfully observes the sacred in the mundane.
This timeless work, spanning 20 years of seasons spent throughout the US, Caribbean, and Southern Africa, this rising multinational voice of the triangular trade situates itself at an intersection of converging roads: gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Each line in these pages lands in the ear with a sonic integrity that holds performative power and potential, as these poems have been presented on stages across the world.
A container for distinct images, impressions, and perspectives, The Animated Universe transmits cosmic truths that activate the inner knower, seer, and scribe in all. A necessary addition to the archive, this electric body of work opens up a timely and necessary portal in today’s literature.