Language : English

Today, Jacques Roumain (1907–1944) is an icon of Haitian literature, politics, and culture, best-known for his second novel Gouverneurs de la rosée, which was published posthumously (1945) and quickly translated into English by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook as Masters of the Dew (1947). Yet throughout his work in multiple domains, Roumain was always writing poetry. Roumain’s Complete Poems translated by Patti M. Marxsen consequently form a kind of journal intime that helps us trace Roumain’s thoughts as he struggled to define himself at every turning point in his brief life.

As the eldest son of an elite, landowning family—and precocious student—Roumain’s resounding voice of outraged resistance coincided with the U.S. Occupation of Haiti (1915–34). By the mid-twentieth century, he spoke fearlessly as a man radicalized by racial injustice, incarceration, and political exile. Throughout it all, poetry was a means of observing, understanding, and coping with his mixed race identity and multiple displacements in his fragmented world.