Take What You Can Carry by Kevin C Pyle

Take What You Can Carry by Kevin C Pyle

THE COLECTION IS HAUNTING, MAGICAL, BOLD AND SENSITIVE; A COMBINATION OF PRAISE SONGS FOR THE CARIBEAN AND CRITICISM OF ITS FAULTS/SHORTCOMINGS.

-Professor Verene Shepherd, Historian-University of the West Indies

Tapping into the voice of the Jamaican people, the poems in this collection speak to life as seen through the eyes of a Caribbean poet grounded in the history, geography and realities of the region and the experiences of its people at home and abroad.

Author Cecile Jarrett became committed to recording life in the 1970s when both the Caribbean social and political landscapes were in the throes of change. In Voices from the Shore, she pauses to criticize the Caribbean political shenanigans, roves across the region sensing the quality of life and perilous existence of its people and captures the haunting beauty of the landscape. In Water, she writes: Mystifying, destroying, / Saving, giving pleasure / Roughing up the roof / Gurgling round the bend / Roaring in the distance / Silent now my friend / Glistening in the sunshine / Gushing from the rock / Surging back to sea / Your power-a potent destroyer.

Presenting a dynamic visual and rhythmic flow and lyrical pace, Jarrett captures and shares the pain and pleasure of the Sisyphus-like existence of Jamaican/Caribbean women and people.

Pyle is the author/illustrator of social justice-themed graphic novels and non-fiction docu-comics. He co-founded and published the purposefully obscure and unwieldy comic compendium Hodags and Hodaddies in the early 1990s. Kevin began contributing to and co-editing World War 3 Illustrated, America's longest-running radical comics anthology, shortly after that. Much of his work for WW3 Illustrated was collected in Lab U.S.A.: Illuminated Documents, a docu-comic published in 2001. Lab U.S.A. is a nonfiction comedy study of secret racist and authoritarian science.

The Society of Illustrators awarded him the Silver Medal for Sequential Art. Kevin has created performance and installation works based on the text that have been shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Mass MOCA, and a variety of other venues. Blindspot, his first graphic novel, was released by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers in 2007. It was published in Lynda Barry's Best American Comics 2008 anthology.

Katman was published in 2009 by Henry Holt and was selected a YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) Outstanding Graphic Novel for 2010. Take What You Can Carry, his third graphic novel, was released in March 2012, and he is currently working on a non-fiction docu-comic called Bad for You with Scott Cunningham, which is about the history of kid-centric moral panics in America.