Anthony Joseph's Haunting the Black Air is a polyphonic exploration of memory, diaspora and sound. Blending poetry, history and Caribbean cosmology, the collection moves with the rhythms of jazz, weaving personal narrative with shifting language. This work is attentive to breath, silence, resonance – and listens as much as it speaks

ROMALYN ANTE, author of Antiemetic for Homesickness

Anthony Joseph writes as if language itself were a drumhead stretched tight across history, each line struck with precision, improvisation and risk. The gorgeous poems in Haunting the Black Air bend and fracture, accumulate and release, carrying grief, beauty, violence and love in the same breath where intellect and instinct dissolve into rhythm, and rhythm, in turn, becomes a form of knowledge. The result is a poetics that is as rigorous as it is sensuous, as grounded in lived experience as it is open to the surreal and the visionary. This is a work of rare formal daring and spiritual depth – a book of friendship that enlarges what poetry can do, how it can sound and how it can carry the weight of the world while still singing

PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy

Haunting the Black Air is a captivating and expansive work. Its landscape and people are rendered so vividly, so imaginatively and so compassionately. Here, conversations reach back and forth in time, and in tribute to writers, musicians, the shopkeeper, even. It is full of music, in the revelry of sound and in echoes ('a poem is a list of echoes'). Here, 'myth fulfils the interstice between memory and loss' (A List of Echoes), because this is a work rooted in tradition and in legacy, that invites careful reading and re-reading. Anthony moves us through elegy, history, through the virtuosity of a jazz riff, the Afrofuturist lens. He writes with an accomplished precision that is generous to the reader, never losing us in all of its experimentation in form, syntax, words, and even letters within the words. This is a powerful, surprising, wonderful book

KEITH JARRETT

It's a commonplace to say that poetry is connected to music, but Anthony Joseph's poetry lives in a miraculous space where we're never quite sure if language or sound predominate . . . In a major leap forward, Joseph continues to astonish with his unique and essential virtuosity in a book that compels rereading and savouring for anyone who wants to know where we're going next

LAURI SCHEYER, author of A History of African American Poetry

Haunting the Black Airis a visual, rhythmic, percussion-fuelled dis/chord of vignettes across continents and oceans, a kaleidoscope of image and word-power embodied by the powerful presence of aunts and mothers, school friends and inconsistent fathers, characters vivid as the islands they are born or borne from . . . A collection that offers much more than a standard collection of poems, where varying categories are harmonious and surprising in turn, as variable as the experiences and voices Joseph gives utterance to, this is essential reading and a vital addition to the canon of Black writing from the Caribbean

MAGGIE HARRIS, author of I Sing to the Greenhearts

If Mikhail Bulgakov and Ishmael Reed had a godson in Trinidad raised on Rapso and John Coltrane solos then what you'd get is Anthony Joseph

ROGER ROBINSON