This Strange Land

the long version

“[In <em>This Strange Land</em>] McCallum crafts a world filled with marvelous ideas about the everyday reality of urban Jamaica, a world of contrasts in which romance and protest make strange bedfellows, where ‘‘beauty and violence lie down together.’” —Review: <em>Literature of Arts of the Americas</em>, Issue 86, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2013, 160-161 “McCallum’s new poems mark a terrific quantum leap in maturity, complexity, and depth. [<em>This Strange Land</em>] appears to be a determined fusion of past and present, of general and personal history, towards a collective memory that would encompass us all.” —Michela A. Calderaro “<em>This Strange Land</em> poignantly and appropriately begins with ‘Psalm for Kingston,’ a poem that calls out to a violent city and its resilient inhabitants. The voices of Kingston . . . are brought up and left to fade into the fabric of the verse . . . It is a fitting way to introduce a book that is in search of what feels almost lost and yet ever-present.” —Thom Dawkins, <em>Weave Magazine</em>