With verbal urgency and visionary imagination, this collection features the work of one of the Caribbean's most important poets. Presenting what life is like on a small island, vulnerable to the wounded thrashings of world capitalism in crisis--an island where livelihoods are destroyed at the flourish of a Brussel bureaucrat's pen; where Paradise is a tourist cruise ship that reminds the people of their neocolonial status; and where global consumerism has poisoned the ambitions of the young into drugs, crime, and violence--these candid poems are a warning of the perils fragmenting societies and ecologies.