My Poetry Corner May 2025 features the poem “Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News” from the poetry collection, Madwoman, by the award-winning Caribbean American poet and writer Shara McCallum. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1972, to an Afro-Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother, she was nine years old when she migrated to Miami, Florida, with her mother and sisters. Her father, a singer and songwriter, stayed behind in Jamaica.

McCallum graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami. She earned her MFA from the University of Maryland and a PhD in African and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York. Her poetry collection Madwoman, published in the UK and USA in 2017, won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry and the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize (New England Poetry Club).

In Madwoman, McCallum explores themes of race, female identity, and womanhood. During a 2018 interview with Arianna Miller for the Gandy Dancer Literary Magazine, the poet explained: “Madwoman was a voice she heard in her head…. [She] eventually became a voice that McCallum could not ignore, which was actually troubling for her considering her father was a schizophrenic.”

The persona takes front stage in seventeen of the fifty-five poems of the collection. We get to know her best in “Ten Things You Might Like to Know About Madwoman” (pp. 42-44). While the list contains a little about the poet’s familial background, we are warned that the persona also has problems distinguishing fact from fiction.

1. The source of her rage and joy are the same, which is true of many people where she’s from, who, at one point or another, have not had a pot to piss in. 

6. She is concerned details of her past make people uncomfortable. For example: her father was crazy, and not just in the colloquial sense. For example: he killed himself.

6b. Since she’s told you this story of her father, she wants to assure you she’s fine now, which you might conclude anyway, if you met her, because she smiles a lot. 

In closing (#10b), she’s worried that, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve likely figured out she’s confused about many things.

Nothing is more confusing to Madwoman than questions of racial identity, especially evident in the poem “Race” about being a black woman who appears white (p. 17). She recalls comments from strangers about her appearance: She’s the whitest black girl you ever saw, / lighter than “flesh” in the Crayola box. / But, man, look at that ass and look at her shake. As a woman now, the conflict about her racial identity could be resolved by simply accepting the privileges that come with passing for white. Why not make a blessing of what / all these years you’ve thought a curse? / You are so everywhere, so nowhere; / in plain sight you walk through walls.

Becoming a mother brought another identity crisis. Everything I’ve said and done has come back to bite me in the ass, Madwoman shares in “Now I’m A Mother” (p. 35). Humility’s what I’m learning – time after time – now I’m a mother. […] I can’t help wondering: is loneliness my crime now I’m a mother? […] My real name’s Dispenser-of-Band-Aids but call me Earth, if you would rather. / It’s all the same to me. Even Shara is just a pseudonym now I’m a mother.

The featured poem, “Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News” (p. 47), exposes the vulnerability of being a woman in a world dominated by madmen, racing towards human extinction.

I know you’ll say I’m overreacting,
but my mother’s prophesying has come to pass:
Armageddon is upon us. Just look at the evidence:
the carriers of our species at every second
being raped and killed and the rare ones
who survive offing their lovers and children
(or worse, if it can be believed, wearing bangs),
molesters and gun-toters skulking
in every lunchbox, the environment
churning into apocalypse….

[…]

But the day’s arrived, as deep down we knew
it would, and spectacles streaming
from across the globe should convince
even the most skeptical
of our soon-to-be extinction. 

Madwoman concludes that her father would’ve called out the madness of our times. Not that we listen to true madmen / anymore…      

Expanding on this theme in the following poem, “Madwoman to Her Deliverer” (p. 48), she asks: how much longer can you carry on, / renaming destruction rescue and peace? // For how many more centuries / do you imagine I can excavate // the part of you that does not issue orders / from the part that follows them?

Fast-forward from 2017 (publication date) to our present time: How do we excavate ourselves from an alternate reality and the resulting madness that consumes us all, humans and non-humans alike?

To read the complete featured poem “Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News” and learn more about the work of Shara McCallum, go to my Poetry Corner May 2025.