Jeremy Jacob Peretz

Jeremy Jacob Peretz is coauthor of Jombii Jamborii (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025), a chapbook of Kriiyaliiz (Guyanese Creole) and English-language poems collaboratively written and translated with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield. Jeremy’s writing, scholarship, and multimedia practice have been widely recognized, including with the Caribbean Studies Association’s biennial Best Dissertation Award. Jeremy’s poems, essays, and films are available through such publications as African American Review, Anthropology News, Asymptote, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Africana Religions. Jeremy holds a PhD from UCLA and teaches in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.

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We will not go quietly into the sea

Golden Shovel after Ralph Regenvanu

My child knows worlds more than I

about life—even if I choose

to learn: read news, project my

own fairytale world words

for him to carefully

recraft into reality. When

he tells stories about nukes I

can hear his (great-)grands say

something bad about that

place they left for this

one. Garden city of his birth may

soon be underwater well

before he can truly be

of the place. Blame the 

bullies of modernity for most

of these world-consequential

catastrophes and make your case 

heard! Dragon elephant adults fight in

Rupununi ICJ savannah and we/he the

grass children are trampled by history

again. My child knows no faith in rule(r)s of   

course law could never apprehend humanity.

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Total Destruction, Only Solution

A lawyer told Joan he saw the nameless

“Demerara” “De Catharina” “slave” bell

on the floor at the back of the museum

where it’s been brought after repatriation

from St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge

where it rang after being stolen away—

lent to the Rijksmuseum and Fitzwilliam

wherewith coming back to shithole Exxon

Guyana country under the boot neck under

knee with 1 billion earmarked for the new

museum announced to fanfare that’s 5 million

US chomp-cheenj Joan says, correctly, knowing

her child nephew son grand so well he knows  200:1

Musk has some 400 billion US and the world

runs like Newtonian clockwork on some 100

trillion [he’s six-years-old and knows / maths:

                                                          one

                                                         ten

                                                        hundred

                                                       thousand

                                                      ten thousand

                                                     hundred thousand

                                                  million 

                                                billion

                                              trillion    quadrillion

                                           and killion is not real

[not a real number = numbers do not kill people

people with numbers kill people for more killions]

but his friend says it is real

and he says: numbers

don’t ever stop but

go on and on to infinity

like the stars no one can

ever count or finish counting

not with all the microscopes

and telescopes and numbers and

bells and whistles and  drums

drums. There will be no end

he says. Bob says:

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