Unfinished Country

The story of Afro-Caribbean poet Norberto James Rawlings is one of migration, loss, adaptation, and reinvention that goes back for generations. Most well-known for “The Immigrants,” a poem about a Black minority community of Anglophone sugar plantation workers, James Rawlings’s poetry has been performed, monumentalized, and celebrated in the Dominican Republic and beyond. Over time his work transcended the acclaim of his most famous poem, offering expansive reflections on the world outside the island of his birth, expressed with an expatriate’s longing. Bringing this selection of James Rawlings’s work into English for the first time, this volume will expand the entry points into one of the most important Caribbean writers yet to punctuate the mainstream.