Workshop of Silence: Poems

Workshop of Silence, a book of poems by the Haitian writer Jean D’Amérique, was published in France by Cheyne éditeur in 2020. Across all of D’Amérique’s work, and especially in this third collection, he bridges the political and the personal, the aggrieved and the hopeful, the local and the global. The first three poems of Workshop offer a helpful overture. The first describes where the speaker’s poems come from (“gnaw[ed] nights sprung from guts”); the second imagines a world where tender...