Cassia Alphonso’s Black Cake Mix, won the award for Best Book of Poetry in the 2012 Guyana Prize for Literature, jointly with Ian McDonald’s The Comfort of All Things. Lori Shelbourn of the University of Leeds, UK was a member of the Jury.
By Lori Shelbourn
The title of this article is taken from one of the stand-out poems in Cassia Alphonso’s Guyana-Prize-winning collection, Black Cake Mix (unpublished). ‘Ladie Lucille’ is a lingering, moving and vividly-drawn character-study of an elderly diabetic woman whose struggle with alcoholism eventually leads to her death. From its first lines, the poem has an instant appeal, which comes in part from Alphonso’s gift for creating singular, subtle characters through the use of resonant detail, and in part from the allure of her poetic voice with its
