The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: Being Dreamity, Algoriddims, Chants & Riffs

The adventurous and immersive latest from Douglas (The Marvellous Equations of the Dread) continues the author’s fusion of poetry and prose with a nonlinear tale combining an escape from slavery in 18th-century Jamaica and immigrant life in 2010s America. In 1788, Abba escapes a Jamaican plantation by taking on the identity of a newly freed woman who died while giving birth. With the dead woman’s newborn son, Quaco, in tow, she attempts to outrun overseers in hot pursuit. An intersecting narrative follows a 20-something undocumented Jamaican seamstress known only as 20A, who’s visited by ICE officers at her job in New Jersey, prompting her to flee on a Greyhound bus to the Grand Canyon. Though 20A imagines the canyon as a place “big enough to hold everything,” she contemplates returning to Jamaica, and when she drifts off to sleep, she dreams of Abba, who loses Quaco during her struggle with an overseer. The baby’s cries reverberate across the ages, and he slips through time, appearing in Jamaica at various points spanning 300 years. “Time and space are twin,” Douglas writes, and as she develops this idea in passages that alternate from prose to verse, the novel takes on a trancelike quality. The author’s originality is on full display in this challenging and rewarding work. (Apr.)