Kumina Queen in Bloomington, MN

Monica Minott’s host of witnesses are women who are collectively grounded in ritual and spiritual understanding, practical, sensible – though, like all of us, flawed in their humanity. Her poems draw on the enduring cult/culture of Jamaican womanhood in the sites that they command and in which they are empowered. This is not a context of gender separation. The sensuality and sexuality of her poems operate in zones where the male force is not to be excluded, but recognised as a presence, even when negative or oppositional, that helps to define female energy and power. In Minott’s poetry, sex is sweet, sex is to be welcomed, though men are expected to be sensitive readers of women if they are to be allowed in. Some men, though, are seen to be discombobulated by the sexual power of women whose sensuality is earthy and grounded in the landscape she inhabits.