Quotes from Kwame Dawes

Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.

One of the blessings and curses of my life is that I carry so many projects at the same time.

If you wait long enough, all murders will have lost their scream, all bloodlines forgotten, all dynamite broken, all storms settled, all bones cleaned of the memory of sin.

I am listening to the wind, to the voice in the wind telling me to write it all down. So I do.

A lot of people say they want to leave this city to go somewhere else. Not me. I love this place for what it is. Ugly and pretty. Rough and tender. Chaotic and smooth. Loving and murderous. All of it.

What has been taken from you, it is this that owns you, and you, shell of all joy, must walk through this city as beautiful as the last summer flowers.

Yes, I am a fat man, but don't sorry for me. In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge. People call you "boss" before they even know who you are. "Big man," "Boss," "Officer," "King," and my favorite, "My Lord." When a woman call you, "My Lord," that is a sweetness.

I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.

The aesthetic, as I understand it, is really about the way in which we understand beauty and speak and think about beauty.

Racist writing is a craft failure.

Our goal is to publish African poets in as many ways as possible.