cover painting: Juli-Anne Russo
In the linked poems that make up her debt collection, The Colour Wheel of My Dreams, Juli-Anne 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. In essence a love story to those who had an impact on her life. 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 and to a country where one has been led to believe that dreams do come true.
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 the US, Canada or the UK. The story takes us to the pandemic and political events of 2020 in the United States and migrating to Italy.
A 10-year longing for a green card to migrate to the US to realize that sometimes there are limitations on dreams that are sometimes placed on ambitious black and brown immigrant women. 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 in the 70s became 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 nor of the America that was promised.
In 2020 the world took an unexpected turn and visions of aquamarine became Mediterranean blue when the family moved to Italy. The Colour Wheel of My Dreams introduces a new voice to the conversation about race, Caribbean migration and belonging.
