Jacqueline de Weever

JACQUELINE de WEEVER - SEED MISTRESS

The first Europeans to visit the Caribbean and the Amazonian realms of South America were overwhelmed by the profusion of animals and plants, many of them brightly-colored, unfamiliar in shape, and unknown to the gardener’s or the chef’s palette. Could you eat it? Would it eat you? Medicine, or poison? Overlaid with the magic of Inca, Maya, and Aztec, the natural world of our hemisphere is as rich as all of Europe’s myths, if only one looks and listens. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Jacqueline de Weever, a medievalist as well as a poet, has overlaid poignant lyric poems using tropical flora and fauna with the region’s troubled history from Columbus onward, in her two prior books, Trailing the Sun’s Sweat (2015), and Rice-Wine Ghosts (2017). In her newest book, Seed Mistress, where “dreams excavate my past,” de Weever plunges us into a world of crocodile caimans, howler monkeys, spice trees, boa constrictors, and armadillos, but just as readily engages with close observations from her own Brooklyn gardens. This is a voluptuous collection of poems with a voice gently but affirmatively outside-looking in: “I joined migrants and refugees long ago. Now I belong nowhere, birthplace an accident/ ancestors from rain forests in Asia, Africa, to meet saturated Amazonia.”

This is the 275th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2020. 100 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $12.95. ISBN: 9798639275159. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

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Version 1.1 Updated January 13, 2026.