“Expansive in scope and incisive in vision, Patrick Sylvain’s Fire on the Tongue distills poetry from memory and experience as only this great poet can. Matching the richness of his legendary oeuvre in Kreyól, Sylvain’s poetry carries us across time and region—Haiti, the Caribbean, the US—toward an elementary lyric fire.”
Fire on the Tongue
by Patrick Sylvain
In Fire on the Tongue, Patrick Sylvain evokes and explores the complexities of homeland, identity and belonging. In poems of grave lyrical beauty and power, he carries us from the shores of his native Haiti to New England, confronting questions of colonialism, multilingualism, and what it means to be from somewhere else. Sylvain begins with an island childhood, where religion and language were themselves migrants from a faraway land, “I grew up in the sweltering heat… among imported mannerisms that buckled the freedom of youth” before bringing us into a history steeped in repression and bloodshed, “memories of Columbus unleashing his swords, planting seeds of violence in the midst of tribes.” Sylvain leaves us with much to contemplate about time, place, and home. Is it possible, Sylvain asks, that home is less a location and more an essence we carry with us, “My muse, a broken homeland lodged deep, Flickers in the mind and the spine.”? A question each reader will answer for themselves.
On sale: April 3, 2026
Patrick Sylvain
Photo redit: Menelik Sylvain
Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain teaches Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and recently served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works include Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) and poetry collections from Central Square, and Finishing Line presses (2026).
“I use words,” writes Patrick Sylvain, “to speak for scorched tongues.” What has scorched those tongues is the complex set of experiences that compose his Haitian-American identity. Sylvain’s poetry carries within it many legacies of his native island’s painful history. HIs poetry is also motivated in no small part by a sense of Haiti’s resistance to that colonial oppression. Coming of age in contemporary America, especially with its racial hypocrisies, provides yet another scorching dimension to Sylvain’s work. And there is also the broader story of an immigrant’s questioning of where his true home actually is. What holds these complexities together is Sylvain’s artful celebration of language itself. Sylvain has written in and translated extensively from Haitian-Creole, but for this collection, the poetry is in English. From metaphorical richness to precise, sensual imagery to intense, expressive musicality, Sylvain speaks a language here that is on fire with joy and sorrow, courage and love
—Fred Marchant
