[Makeda Braithwaite, Go Fish: Go In De Pack, Bamboo Talk Press, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 2024. 101 pp.]
Makeda K. Braithwaite’s first collection of poetry, Go Fish: Go In De Pack, is a work of very special merit. It was on the Shortlist for the Guyana Prize for Literature Best First Book of Poetry 2023, and highly commended by the Jury as one of only four books shortlisted overall.
Braithwaite is an extraordinary talent. Remarkably, a year ago, she was awarded the Third Prize in the Guyana Prize for Fiction 2022 with her first collection of short stories An Anthology of Shivers, entered as an unpublished manuscript. It is interesting to note that in 2022 Chairman of the Jury Funso Aiyejina in his citation described her as “one to watch” among emerging Guyanese fiction writers. It can be said that he called it correctly, since an entirely different panel of Jurors headed by Evelyn O’Callaghan, singled out her poetry collection, also an unpublished manuscript, Go Fish: Go In De Pack, to be shortlisted for the Poetry Prize.