Calabash Literary festival director Colin Channer (back row centre) with women poets (from left) Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Suheir Hammad, Ishle Yi Park, and reggae artiste/poet Tanya Stephens during Saturday night's presentation at the festival.

The Girls Behaving Badly segment proved the biggest hit at Saturday's presentation of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth.

There were four women: Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Suheir Hammad, Ishle Yi Park and Tanya Stephens - all from diverse backgrounds with diverse experiences, which were highlighted through their words.

First up, Trinidad-born Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has actually lived in New York since she was 13. Before a much more invigorated crowd, she spoke with a rather diluted Trinidadian accent.

She began with Arima, from which she read, Julie/the mango/split my lips in praise/i rise follow moon/to its fading light. Yearning followed, before she read from her new book, Convincing The Body.

Americanising, a poetic response to being teased about her accent during her first years in America, preceded Mango Pretty - her ode to "all the big and beautiful women in the house" - before Taylor closed with Tobago and Deh Accuse Meh.

Up next, Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian born to refugee parents in Amman, Jordan, who went to New York when she was five. Before she took to the stage, a recording of a conversation she had with her father was played, as well as the poem, Daddy's Song, giving a hint at her motivation for becoming a writer and a poet.

She then appeared, green sash around her waist touched by her long hair. When Hammad told of her experience at the airport, it was clear from the get-go that this would be a fun session.

In This Is Brooklyn, she read, If you tell the truth here/You have nothing to fear, delivering the lines with a fast-paced almost rapping cadence. A poem for her mother, who she said is in a competition with her father as to whom gets the most stage time, followed. Hammad riffed on the myriad racial and other codes of classification in the US in This Is To Certify That My Mother Is Now Natural, closing with the lines, Never can they certify/What they don't understand.

She had been striking chords with the audience since she began and hit harder with her last piece. Hammad stated that the only thing that kept her out of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was a craving for Korean food, which took her elsewhere. A few days after the tragedy, she wrote First Writing Since, which was filled with vivid imagery of pain, loss, confusion and the comfort offered by total strangers, as well as the frustration suffered by the stereotypes about Middle Easterners and in some ways at no longer being considered quite as an American - which immediately followed.

Ishle Yi Park was hilarious from the moment she took the stage, introducing herself as "Ishle Yi Park. I'm not Ms Chin, I'm Ms Park", to laughter. A Korean/American with the stature and features to match, she was an impassioned ball of energy onstage, not only reciting her poetry but singing - a cappella, as well as with the aid of a guitar and rapping with the audience.

Her poems moved from the realm of family and the shame of growing up with fishmongers to snapshots of the lives of Koreans in New York. A sample of a Korean pop song was followed by Ski Sonnet, which was a love story, and Kunemo, a short story about the funny advice from an aunt on marriage, taken from her award-winning first book The Temperature of This Water.

The ribald P---y followed to general hilarity before she took up her guitar and closed with entertaining renditions of Bob Marley's Mellow Mood, Beres Hammond's Tempted To Touch and Tracy Chapman's Baby Can I Hold You [Sorry], the audience singing along and clapping in time all the way.

Jamaican DJ Tanya Stephens' set was disappointingly short. She delivered the only poem she had, questioning why the same people who sey God is in the sky/Ah di same people who have a problem when mi get high, and but King James/Not even one likkle verse from a woman/Not to worry/Behold/the chronicles of Tanya. She continued, singing, You keep looking up/Why don't you look around you/I am everywhere, over a pre-recorded track. Stephens then left the stage, but after the audience voiced its displeasure, she returned to do It's A Pity and What A Day, before Girls Behaving Badly came to an end.

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