"Presenting....for the first time in book form...CALAZAZA’S DELICIOUS DERELICTION from Tupelo Press, my translation of the brilliant writer, Suzanne Dracius, from Martinique. Even made of stone, calazazas can be sexy !"
Nancy Naomi Carlson, AHCMC Grant Award for this translation

Calazaza’s Delicious Dereliction (Exquise déréliction métisse, Prix Fetkann / Fetkann Award)
by Suzanne Dracius (Prize of the Society of the French Poets) and translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson (AHCMC Grant Award for this translation)
de Suzanne Dracius (Prix de la Société des Poètes français), traduit en anglais par Nancy Naomi Carlson
Édition bilingue
https://www.tupelopress.org/books/calazaza

"In dazzling hybridity, Suzanne Dracius dances with racial, social, sexual, and linguistic identities, bridging flavors and full-bodied figures of speech from the Latin and Greek to French and Creole, addressing friends, challenging categories and -isms, triumphantly celebrating her "frank Creolity" throughout this jubilant collection of poems. Dracius is fortunate indeed in her translator, Nancy Naomi Carlson, who beautifully renders the dense word and sonic play Dracius trades in. The rhetoric here has ancient roots ; the figures and issues are contemporary, compelling, and profound."
Sidney Wade

"How can we resist Suzanne Dracius’s bewitching book, her sorcerous verses, her gorgeous songs of the Caribbean’s painful colonial history, the horror transformed to beauty ? We are swept deliriously as French, Creole, and Latin copiously flow in and out of one another, what she might call a poetics of “independence, cadence, and dance.” Heir to Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite and Lorna Goodison too, Dracius of Martinique is a fierce griot who celebrates her “féte of flavors of mixed descent,” a Calibana who sings of her Antilles’s “fervent métissage.”
We are awed by Dracius’s intellectual acuity, the speed by which the mythic collapses into the quotidian, then back again, the sonic playfulness of her pastiches of the Creole French and the Greco-Roman. We are indebted to Naomi Nancy Carlson who transported these verses into English with verve and piquancy, aural skill and consummate knowledge. We should give high praise to this expert translation of a formidable poet."
Orlando Ricardo Menes

– Click here CALAZAZA’S DELICIOUS DERELICTION - November 2015
Suzanne Dracius (Prize of the Society of the French Poets and Fetkann Award)