"This collection of deeply felt and powerfully moving Haitian poetry dating back to the first decades of the Caribbean island's independence from French colonial rule sheds a much needed light on an important and often neglected period in Haiti's literary history. Editors Kadish and Jenson have made a significant corpus of largely unknown poetry accessible to a wide audience for the first time with this essential bilingual volume of early-nineteenth-century verse that celebrates the authors' African origins, freedom from oppression, equality for all, and the legitimacy of the only modern country born from a slave revolt"--

Doris Y. Kadish is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of French and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. Deborah Jenson is Professor of Romance Studies and Global Health at Duke University. Norman R. Shapiro is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation at Wesleyan University and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.