Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for first full collection.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean’s largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s oldest independent Caribbean speciality bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, is published by Peepal Tree Press. Shivanee also blogs about LGBT+ issues in the Caribbean.

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Your collection reveals a plethora of women, either as witness (i. e. the virgin in the woods), or women who have been vilified (the abortionist’s daughter) or who have been cast out and banished/excluded (Lilith). Many of your poems subvert the demonic and offer a counterpointal view; they give us kind parents for ‘the wicked’, for example. Can some of this be ‘writing back’ or even rewriting the tainted women of the old books? Recasting lore and folklore? I’m thinking of this as a tradition in female Caribbean writing, Rhys, Melville etc.

I’ve been in love with nasty women long before that term acquired currency as a trending battle cry. This is the reason Kali is the god of my household of one – no sanitised version, but Kali in her black-skinned, murderous, protectorate ire and grace. It’s my honour to write about women who bleed, fuck, dance, cuss, transact and thief without apology, be they gentle or garrotte-hearted.