Coco Island

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025
Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature 2025
Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2025

Christine Roseeta Walker's first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches – especially of girls and women – Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.