These poems by Millicent Graham have a compactness and economy that belies the complex and expansive range of emotions and considerations that occupy her imagination.

Graham's poems offer us a way to see her distinctly contemporary and urban Jamaica through the slant eye of a surrealist, one willing to see the absurdities and contradictions inherent in the society that preoccupies her. These are poems about family, about love, about spirituality, about fear and mostly about desire, where the dampness of things is as much about the humid sensuality of this woman's island, as it is about her constant belief in fecundity, fertility and the unruliness of the imagination.

For a poet publishing her first collection, Graham's sense of irony, and instinct for surprise and freshness in image are remarkably mature and sophisticated. But it is the sharpness of image and the precision in her use of language that announce the arrival of an extremely talented poet: 'I am the curve set straight/ by a guava switch, the proof/ that love can make you flinch.' Graham knows the tradition of Caribbean poetry, and is deeply aware of the value of both homage and resistance.
The result is a wonderfully executed balancing act that ultimately suggests a newness of sensibility and imagination.

In The Damp in Things, we are invited into the unique imagination of Millicent Graham, and we find ourselves in a world of psychological density and liveliness, and a space of sharply honed intelligence that remains strangely light and alert because of her slanting wit and off-kilter humour.

Millicent A. A. Graham was born 1974 in Kingston, Jamaica. She has recently been published in City Lighthouse Poetry Anthology 2009; Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Vol 5 No 1, 2008 and The Caribbean Writer Vol. 17.