Blue Flare: Three Contemporary Haitian Poets
Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Celie Agnant, Maggy de Coster
Three celebrated poets illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21st century, particularly for women, in this exceptional and unprecedented trilingual collection. In Évelyne Trouillot’s sensual poems about love and yearning, she asks repeatedly “in what language should I speak to you”? Marie-Célie Agnant addresses poverty, pain, death, but also the pleasures of passion. Maggy De Coster’s concise and personal poems explore the world — its nature, light, wind — and, sometimes, political themes. Together, these poems navigate between an impulse to “capture gently these moments of light” (De Coster) and the very different insistence that we see how “pain sits at ground level / at times charging like a beast” (Agnant). The original poems in French and Haitian Kreyòl appear facing the English translations by Danielle LeGros Georges. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Évelyne TrouillotPré-Texte, a writer's organization that sponsors reading and writing workshops.
Marie-Célie Agnant is a writer, translator, and activist whose novels have been widely-translated and include The Book of Emma (2004) which evokes the hardships endured by enslaved women in the Caribbean and the challenges to giving voice to this history today. Living in Montréal and writing across literary genres, she has produced poetry, fiction, tales, and books for young readers. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes des terres brûléesShe worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre and regularly visits Vermont. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate (national poet laureate).
Maggy de Costerthe literary journal Manoir des Poètes, er poems have been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Arabic.
Translator Danielle Legros Georges is the author of Island Heart (2021), translations of the poems of Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert, among other titles. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and included in international artistic commissions and collaborations. In 2014, Legros Georges was named Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature, and a professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.
