Ground Provisions

In her debut collection, Ground Provisions, Shauna M. Morgan takes us on a sensory journey across landscapes of the body and the earth. Shortlisted in the poetry category of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the collection traverses the natural world from the Caribbean to North America and provokes questions about identity in the making of diasporas and the formation of multi-ethnic realities. What remains and what is created anew? Who emerges at the fissures of culture? What is learned from human relationships with the land? How do we make provisions between generations?

These poems guide us through a backabush Jamaican community to an often-hostile US environment as they interrogate power, follow the desire for freedom, explore the necessity of ancestral memory, and answer the crucial need to touch the earth and each other.

Sonnet and sestina walk alongside poetic forms such as haibun and duplex to explore family origins and Afro-Indo cultural syncretism while offering intimate views of the speakers and their interior lives. We witness grief overwhelming the mind and body, children holding painful secrets, women leaning into sensuality, and families coming to terms with fracture and reconciliation.

Through intertwined familial and historical inheritances, these poems ask us to imagine the liberatory possibilities of establishing new roots with legacy seeds.