PREE 14

Mural by Richard Smith, downtown Kingston

The prompt for our fourteenth issue came from James Baldwin:

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth”

— James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross”. Letter from a Region in My Mind”.

For PREE 14, authors were invited to engage with Baldwin’s expansive vision of love, and his notion of quest. “Dare we breach established rules of inclusion and exclusion to escape conceptions of the present and past dictated by the ruling culture? What might this quest of the daring self-aware subject look like? And where is the love? We welcome your explorations that challenge default assumptions about love —- in the Caribbean context, or otherwise — and paint a picture of what love might look like if we ventured into the unknown.”

FICTION

The Talking Forest of Yaminsa
Ayasha Ayurbe

Seaside
Jose Belaval

Lifting the Veil
Yvonne Weekes

Scarface
Melanie Grant

All is Not Lost in Translation
Yzahira Valle García

Bush Baths
Amanda Haynes

Frankie’s Father
Danielle James

NONFICTION

The Things We Inherit, The Things We Let Go
Ashae Forsythe

POETRY

There is Only Wailing, The First Cries, Inheritance
Yashika Graham