“I have the nerve
to walk my own way”
‍ ‍

- Zora Neale Hurston

“There is a seriousness in his work which has to do with his respect for the heft of a people’s lived life.”
— Prof. Laurence Breiner, literary critic, academic
“Vladimir Lucien’s Sounding Ground demonstrates considerable emotional and stylistic range, and makes inspired use of various kinds and registers of Creole”
— OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature
“Sounding Ground for me is the start of a new tradition in the anglophone Caribbean”
— Prof. Kamau Brathwaite, poet, historian, critic
“An astute thinker and budding philosopher, he possesses an enormous ability to mash up language and to reflect on its possibilities to interpret our world.”
— Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe, professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley, University
“Lucien is a fertile maker of metaphors”
— Prof., Mervyn Morris, poet & literary critic
“Vladimir Lucien’s keen observations draw on sound, song, sorrow, survival strategies, and the full scope of the lives and landscapes surrounding his poem’s subjects…The wide-reaching intelligence at the center of Sounding Ground holds many consciousnesses — human and greater-than-human, living and ancestral, and still yet to be born.
-”
— Prof. Camille Dungy, poet and editor


‍ ‍

“His poems are hefty, accomplished and underived, rooted in the Creole Cultures of his home island.”
— Prof. Pamela Mordecai, scholar, poet, novelist, anthologist