Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
Not quite conventional poetry, not quite manifesto.
Perfect if you want to feel how language itself can be colonised, and how poetry breaks it open.
Synopsis
“English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is not not a foreign lan lan lang language l/anguish anguish—a foreign anguish.”
This collection confronts what it means to inherit English — the coloniser’s tongue — as a Black Caribbean woman. Philip fractures and recombines language: lines splinter, stutter, break apart. The poems explore exile, memory, gender, and the violence of silence imposed on colonised peoples.
Reading it feels like being pulled into a struggle where every word carries both betrayal and possibility. The poems are sharp, sometimes playful, sometimes searing. Silence is not absence here but a wound, and poetry becomes both weapon and balm.
Mood:
lyrical · fractured · political · intimate
Tone:
angry · playful · experimental · fierce
It Feels Like
Body:
a tightening in the throat, words that resist being swallowed.
Tempo:
syncopated, stumbling, breaking rhythm.
Texture:
cracked porcelain — sharp edges in the mouth.
A Little Taste
“silence is not silence but a shutting in silence is the woman bound silence is the child without a name silence is memory gnawing the bone”
The Aftertaste
A battle with English as both inheritance and violence.
The fracture of language becomes a revelation: to write broken is to tell the truth.
You leave with your ears sharpened to the politics hidden in every word you speak.
Peel With a Drink
To be Read with A glass of dark rum, neat — heavy, burning, rooted in sugarcane and colonial history. Sweetness cut by fire, it scorches the throat, then lingers with smoke and molasses.
The warmth is deceptive; behind it is the weight of ships, silence, and survival, leaving a trace that refuses to fade.
Peel With a Reel
Tongues Untied (1989, dir. Marlon Riggs) — a film-poem reclaiming language, identity, and voice.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1968, dir. Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas) — a political film-essay about colonialism and resistance in Latin America, fragmented and didactic, language as weapon.
Peel with a Beat
Peel me a Book
Or Try:
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
another fractured, hybrid text, where silence, history, and language refuse smooth telling.
Let's Peel
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
Not quite conventional poetry, not quite manifesto.
Perfect if you want to feel how language itself can be colonised, and how poetry breaks it open.
Synopsis
“English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is not not a foreign lan lan lang language l/anguish anguish—a foreign anguish.”
This collection confronts what it means to inherit English — the coloniser’s tongue — as a Black Caribbean woman. Philip fractures and recombines language: lines splinter, stutter, break apart. The poems explore exile, memory, gender, and the violence of silence imposed on colonised peoples.
Reading it feels like being pulled into a struggle where every word carries both betrayal and possibility. The poems are sharp, sometimes playful, sometimes searing. Silence is not absence here but a wound, and poetry becomes both weapon and balm.
Mood:
lyrical · fractured · political · intimate
Tone:
angry · playful · experimental · fierce
It Feels Like
Body:
a tightening in the throat, words that resist being swallowed.
Tempo:
syncopated, stumbling, breaking rhythm.
Texture:
cracked porcelain — sharp edges in the mouth.
A Little Taste
“silence is not silence but a shutting in silence is the woman bound silence is the child without a name silence is memory gnawing the bone”
The Aftertaste
A battle with English as both inheritance and violence.
The fracture of language becomes a revelation: to write broken is to tell the truth.
You leave with your ears sharpened to the politics hidden in every word you speak.
Peel With a Drink
To be Read with A glass of dark rum, neat — heavy, burning, rooted in sugarcane and colonial history. Sweetness cut by fire, it scorches the throat, then lingers with smoke and molasses.
The warmth is deceptive; behind it is the weight of ships, silence, and survival, leaving a trace that refuses to fade.
Peel With a Reel
Tongues Untied (1989, dir. Marlon Riggs) — a film-poem reclaiming language, identity, and voice.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1968, dir. Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas) — a political film-essay about colonialism and resistance in Latin America, fragmented and didactic, language as weapon.