Tiana Reid, Small Axe's editorial assistant, has recently published a piece for Cordite Poetry Review on Safiya Sinclair's debut book of poems, Cannibal, and Tiphanie Yanique's 2015 Wife. "If the novel form is a question mark," she asks," then, and while reading...Cannibal... I thought the poetic form might as well be an em dash. Versatile, incidental, fragmented, paratactic, broken down and broken into."

To read Tiana's full review, please visit Cordite's website. 

Tiana Reid is a writer whose work has been published in ARC Magazine, Bitch, Briarpatch, The Feminist Wire, Full Stop, Lemon Hound, Maisonneuve, Mask Magazine, The New Inquiry, Rabble.ca, The Rumpus, The Toast, VICE and more. She is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and editorial assistant at Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

Listening to Small Axe 52

by Tiana Reid 

While working on Small Axe 52, I kept hearing it. In the inaugural Small Axe playlist, you can hear what I heard: a “no capitalist” chorus, Nicole Awai’s “oozing between [the] mediums” of visual art and music, influences of Nina Simone and Wu-Tang Clan, Jamaica Kincaid’s voice, and much more. A good chunk of this playlist includes the “reggae revival” discussed in Kezia Page’s “Bongo Futures,” which was published in Small Axe 52. Other references were less to-the-letter, like Edna Manley’s 1936 mahogany sculpture, Market Women, which takes shape in Langston Hughes’s literary imagination of “old women” in Paris and Mexico.

Small Axe 52 playlist 

Small Axe 52 

March 2017 is now available! 

This issue includes a special section, "Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice," guest-edited by Annalee Davis, Joscelyn Gardner, Erica Moiah James, and Jerry Philogene that focuses on the work of women whose artistic practices are grounded in a feminist ethos and engage multiple and nuanced meanings of the Caribbean and its diaspora across linguistic, geographic, material, and formal boundaries. The visual portfolio includes art by Deborah Anzinger, Sheena Rose, Keisha Scarville, and others. The special section "Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité" edited by Martin Munro and Celia Britton, includes a variety of essays that explore and assess the impact, twenty-five-plus years on, of the controversial manifesto by Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. SX52 also features a discussion of Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. 

See our full table of contents here.