This is a collection of poetry which provides visions of Caribbean life - history, family, Black lives, love and sexual passion and the contraries of experience. Adisa writes powerfully about the solidarity of women and movingly about the female elders of her own family.

This feisty and sensuous collection of poetry includes powerful poems about the solidarity of women, the female elders of the poet's own family, and the desire for male difference. In these poems there is no gap between the historical, the political, and the personal, all are defined by the presence or absence of the freedom to enjoy the fruits of life. Whether writing about history, family, black lives, love, or sexual passion, Opal Palmer Adisa has an acute eye for the contraries of experience. A number of poems exhibit a witty dance between food and sexuality, but within this focus on the physical, there is also a keen sense of the oppression of the female body. In her poem "Bumbu Clat," for example, she explores the deformation of a word that originally signified sisterhood to become part of the most misogynist curses in Jamaican society.