CARD games are not merely metaphors for leisure and Sunday-afternoon amusement, as the title of Makeda Braithwaite’s debut poetry collection, Fish: Go In de Pack, might suggest. Instead, the collection explores the many ways of being in the world, the major and minor chords of human experience. Here, a quick-witted, perceptive talent at work draws deftly from the pack and produces poems remarkable in their range, sensitivity, and imaginative power.

Braithwaite is an honest writer with a cool, attentive eye: a seer whose interest in the world is granular, yet whose vision is expansive. She attends closely to particular objects, gestures, and experiences before stepping back to consider their wider implications, then returning to the immediate subject with a newly enlarged understanding. The movement resembles a finely tuned jazz solo, in which a phrase is explored, extended, and revisited, each return revealing something new. This quality is evident in “Award Winning Photograph, 2002,” where the camera’s eye captures not merely an individual in a landscape of privation, but also the history that has produced the suffering. That history initially seems external to the object under consideration; eventually, however, it becomes inseparable from it, locating the subject’s suffering within its proper historical and political context.

The “big bellied child” is implicated in a chain of historical causation that the poem invites us to investigate. What has happened? What does it look like, and who is responsible? Who ignores it, perpetuates it, or profits from it? The poem is political without being didactic. It presents a fact, then asks the reader to consider its implications. One of its many deft moves is to connect the child to “Walter,” an allusion to Walter Rodney and the indisputable force of his research into the historical and economic structures of underdevelopment. The child receives no meaningful assistance, only the attention of those who look, record, and move on. The child remains peripheral to the processes of extraction and accumulation: the reaping, underdevelopment, and theft of natural resources that sustain the prosperity of others.

The camera is an especially effective conceit. Its frame allows the poem to offer fragments of a larger reality, making the close-up immediate, confronting, and terrible:

The camera still, big bellied child, flies buzzing

Feet dry, dust in eye, and tongue heavy,

Hands too light to chase flies

That flutter from mines, dug deep in darkness

Strange men put you on magazine covers

And forget about you, in some divine joke.

The poem exposes the consequences of African exploitation, but it does so by keeping the suffering individual in view. The camera catches the personal aftermath of political and economic systems, bringing the human cost of historical abstractions into sharp focus. The child is at once a particular victim and a figure through whom a much larger history becomes visible. The photograph may preserve the image, but preservation is not intervention; to look is not necessarily to care, and to document suffering is not to remedy it.

A similar movement from the particular to the collective informs “Greens,” which begins within the familiar domestic world before opening onto a wider social reality. The apparently innocuous opening lines establish an intimate, conversational register:

Them greens don’t last like they used to,

Cripple, watery and shriveled up in the fridge

Even when ya put it in a little water and wrap

It in a tissue. I don’t know what they’re putting in it,

but it’s spoiling fast, fast, fast

Like how gpl does cut you light….

The complaint sounds like something a mother might make in the ordinary course of household life. Yet the poem quickly moves beyond the immediate inconvenience of spoiled vegetables to suggest a more pervasive condition of collective hardship. The comparison to the electricity company’s service interruptions evokes a familiar public frustration, extending the mother’s complaint into a shared community experience. What begins as a concern about food becomes an observation about the conditions under which people must live, and about the indifference of the institutions on which they depend.

The poem’s language is central to this achievement. Written in a close approximation of Guyanese Creole, it establishes a sense of intimacy and cultural recognition that a more formal register might diminish. Its diction carries the rhythms of ordinary speech, lending the complaint an immediacy that is at once personal and communal. The vernacular is not merely decorative, nor does it reproduce speech for its own sake. It is a mode of knowing and articulating experience, placing the reader within the social world from which the poem emerges.

Braithwaite’s poems are distinguished by their frankness. Even her metaphoric disguises ultimately serve to disclose rather than conceal: they clarify, expose, and make plain. She resists the parochial impulse to treat intimate experience as though it were localised, and she does not retreat into abstraction when the material before her calls for directness. Instead, she follows experience wherever it leads, allowing the particular to retain its individuality even as it opens onto larger emotional and social meanings. In “Jitters,” for instance, the speaker’s emotional and physical uncertainty is expressed through a language that is both direct and suggestive:

I am all out of sorts, forgive me

For my ignorance, kiss me. I’m

We fall into sheets of silk, and slip and

Slide, I touch the crook of his arm

So nervous. Come to me, come

Out and holler for me.

The passage captures the awkwardness of desire, the vulnerability of a speaker who wants intimacy while struggling to articulate the terms of that desire. The language slips between confession, invitation, and recollection, mirroring the instability of the experience itself. The poem does not explain away the speaker’s nervousness; it allows that nervousness to inhabit the line, the syntax, and the pauses.

A similar erotic frisson animates “Savannah Grass,” where the carnival milieu provides an appropriate setting for a sensuality that is at once individual and culturally situated. The dance becomes a prelude to sexual intimacy, its physical rhythms reflecting the exuberance of the bacchanal:

Shimmering glitter, all along my thighs,

Feathers—jotting out my back, soca

Pulling from my hip bones, buttocks Jiggling.

The sensuality here doesn’t depend on explicit description. Instead, Braithwaite builds the scene through movement, texture, sound, and the body’s response to music. Her attention is not limited to sensory particulars; it also registers the mind’s participation in the experience. The self-consciousness implicit in “I am all out of sorts” in “Jitters,” is an analysis of feeling as much as an expression of it. Such detail contributes to a poetic realism in which the totality of an experience emerges through its integral sensations, thoughts, and hesitations. The poems are frank without being crude, intimate without becoming merely confessional.

The love poems in the collection’s first section are tender, perceptive, and often confessional, yet not entirely private. Their emotional insights arise from individual circumstances but speak to experiences that readers can recognise as their own. In “Linden: December 2021,” for example, the remembered intimacy of lovers splashing together in “tea-stained water” gives the poem a delicate lyricism. The moonlight, the tides, and the water evoke the rhythms of Shakespearean love poetry, while the setting’s particularity grounds the feeling in a recognisably Guyanese landscape. Memory becomes a medium through which intimacy is preserved, and loss is felt anew.

In “Sea-Ballad,” love is approached tentatively, almost suspiciously, as though the participants are uncertain whether they can trust their feelings. The lovers seem to be practising at love, learning its gestures while remaining alert to the possibility of disappointment. This uncertainty gives the poem its emotional credibility. Other poems in the collection explore seduction, separation, regret, and the difficult persistence of attachment. Together, they suggest that love is neither a single condition nor a reliable shelter, but an unstable mixture of desire, vulnerability, and remembrance.