No Ruined Stone

In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland’s best-loved Bard, following Robert Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica—then seeing his enslaved granddaughter come back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women. Evie Shockley This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer’s most insidious tools and McCallum’s gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. Adrian Matejka A subtle, multi-layered verse narrative… The worlds it vividly presents beget reflections on creativity, history, slavery, race and many other issues. It is an exceptional work, a memorable achievement. Mervyn Morris Seemingly controlled words surge with echoes; poems keep double-entry accounts, striping the page, laddering like stockings. McCallum achieves an un-haunting. Characters are realer than real, less imaginary than re-storied. Like the returning dead, whom nothing ‘will quench or unhunger’, this work wants you, wants us, ‘to begin again’. Vahni Capildeo

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