Jamaica’s leading female performance poet, Cherry Natural, lit up an intimate audience of supporters, writers and other poets with her unabashed takes on gender relations, women empowerment, social inequality, and love, recently at Oasis on the Oxford in St Andrew as she launched her latest anthology of poems, The Lyrical Contortionist.

Holding a black belt in martial arts, the title of her third book comes as no surprise.

Guest speaker Barbara Blake-Hannah introduced her as the “intellectual bad gyal”, and retired Poet Laureate Professor Mervyn Morris described her as a “rhythmic warrior poet”, whose verses are ‘enlivened by clever rhyme, wit and sarcasm’. Other voices in the public domain such as Mutabaruka and university lecturer Professor Carolyn Cooper, also gave their support.

The evening featured stirring performances by published author Antonia Valair, whose first book, Pearl’s Among Stones, earned her a Prime Minister Youth Award. She was followed by Cherry Natural’s daughter, Little Natural, whose performance brimmed with her mother’s gift of the spoken word.

Dub poet Wise Wurdz then delivered his own package of spoken word treats. These served as tantalising appetisers to Cherry Natural’s reading from her new trove of poems.

In a captivating performance of her treatise on poetry, Cherry Natural delivered “sharp-edge rhymes lace wid political meaning”; words from one of her more militant pieces titled Send Di Poem Come, in which she asserts her poetic licence over “frozen rhetoric”. Not in the habit of mincing words, Cherry Natural poked at the new age fads of popular culture. In Slanguage, she made observations of the negative effects of social media on a generation hooked on its dopamine-induced effects.

“A whole generation raised by gadgets. Bedtime stories of neglect. The smallest a youth home alone, left with a smart phone. Nuh baby sitta; parents a duh road — yuh ha fe fall dem pon twitta”, she intoned to the applause of an enthused audience.

Cherry Natural also made deep inroads into the usually controversial issues of gender and women empowerment. In I’m Woman, Cherry Natural disavowed societal expectations of women having to be weak and fragile to be desirable, asserting provocatively, ‘If I advocate for my rights as a woman, I’m not betraying my man’. She also spoke freely about the nuances of gender relations and encouraged women and men to speak more openly on these matters.

On the other hand, in Check Him Out, she warned women to be more prudent in their pick of Mr Right, a characterisation which she then gave in a forward, more humorous piece titled Levi Jeans, both of which built up the audience to a whooping crescendo of laughs and cheers.

Cherry Natural spoke candidly between each reading, interweaving thoughts on her work, not just as a dub poet, but also as a martial arts instructor for both children and adults, which she said forms a big part of her service to Jamaica and humanity on a whole.

On a sober note, Cherry Natural also shared personal experiences of living in the crime-torn communities along Mountain View Avenue in St Andrew, noting insightfully that the roads in the community were all named in relation to the gun.

“Riffle Road, Butts Crescent, Target Street, the shooting range, Warriors Hill, Mountain View. No names of flowers, only wreath made from flowers”, she said, calling attention to a never-ending cycle of violence existing in that community.

As one who would have seen this first-hand, Cherry Natural’s words reverberated through Mountain View My Story, powerfully.

“Do you know what it feels like to hear spent shells from gunshots, dropping on the rooftop like raindrops?”, was Cherry Natural’s refrain, noting the sad reality of families living in the same community, yet separated by borders.

The book comes in five segments, each previewed with insightful haikus, and includes seven of Cherry Natural’s personal writing principles: observe, listen, engage in conversations, eavesdrop, read, spend time alone and write something every day.

Endorsed by Dr Glenda Simms, “as one who sees the underbelly of all areas of her country’s life and her people’s soul”, Cherry Natural delivered a timely collection of poignant messages.

Cherry Natural has two other books entitled Come Mek We Reason and Earth Woman. Her most recent album is Intellectual Bad Gal.