"Dreams are stories and images that our minds create while we sleep. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, and sometimes bizarre."

In the linked poems that make up her debut collection, The Colour Wheel of My Dreams, Juli-Anne Royes Russo explores the complex emotions that come with voluntarily leaving the country of her birth, Jamaica for America, and searching for a place to call home. Throughout the collection, Juli-Anne's dreams process loss, brutal winters, cultural isolation, a woman of colour, and racism while living in America. She reflects on the longing to leave her small conservative post-colonial island for freedom, to the country where "dreams do come true."

Through the words of journal entries written between 2007 and 2023, Juli-Anne takes the reader from childhood in the late 1970s to the turbulence of the 1980s that would see two generations of Jamaicans mass-migrating to America, Canada or the UK, to eventually migrating to Italy; a 10-year longing for a green card to migrate to America, to realising the limitations on dreams that are placed on ambitious black and brown immigrants.

After 18 years of living in America, Juli-Anne dreams of returning to her island paradise of sun, sea, waterfalls, and exotic fruits and flowers. Nostalgia for the Jamaica of her childhood becomes an all-time high, one brutal New Jersey winter in 2014. She envisions a view of the Caribbean Sea and free from snow.

Her memoir in poetry, emerges as she wrestles with the memories of a Jamaica that is no longer that of her childhood, and of the America that was promised. In 2020 the world takes an unexpected turn. Visions of aquamarine becomes Mediterranean blue.

The Colour Wheel of My Dreams introduces a new voice to the conversation about race, Caribbean migration and belonging.

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• Publication Date: June 28, 2023
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 134 Pages
• File Size: 12 KB