Policape is a modern writer who can not be categorized. He is a poet who is a novelist who writes essays, an essayist who loves succinct forms like theater plays and screenplays, and a singer as well. He is more attached to a vision rather then a singular genre. His artistic vision is fused with his religious vision of human nature and the world. For Policape, as for the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, “nothing human is alien to him” and in that sense, he is an unorthodox poet of sensual and religious poetry. Policape in his human perspective strongly feels that our sensual and spiritual natures must be alert to one another and must have a constructive relationship between them on our earth journey. He feels that the spirit of God must pervade the sensual body as much as it must anoint the spiritual body. Some of his richest and most enlightening poems are created out of this mixture which of course brings to light his true subject, explicit or hidden: Love. Everything starts and ends with Policape interpretations and declarations of love. The three kinds of love that Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about and made famous during his time on this earth, Policape illuminates: the love of God, the love of parents, siblings and friends, and the love of lovers.
His first collection,The Bird’s Love for Poetry and Essays, situates everybody’s humanity and ordinary experiences under the microscope of love. Communion, connection, dialogue, empathy, generosity are the keys to this collection whether Policape is giving homage to his mother or President Bill Clinton or trying to understand the beauty of a woman-child, or his brother’s death, or a clear, crisp September morning. That collection was published in 2004. Then in 2006, two collections emerged, sensual and religious, intertwined; what he is fond of calling, “his two God-given siblings:” A Spiritual Journey and Interpretations of Romance. “We are both half-animal and half-divine,” he writes, “and I wanted my poetry to reflect that unique quality in us as human beings.” The three dimensions of love are on display in these two fine collections. Policape extends this duality of love and spirit in his two forthcoming poetry collections on CD, Love Kept Me Awake and I Am Flying With The Lord. Love Kept Me Awake will be released on the 31st of January, 2009 and the second CD; I Am Flying With The Lord will be out in the fall of 2009.
The Gift of Misfortune and Daddy, I See Blood: Confrontations Between Good and Evil, represents his expressive gaze in the prose cycle. The Gift of Misfortune is a novel that combines the immigrant experience with the personal story of an Americanized outsider and Daddy I See Blood is a fascinating and frankly, frightened encounter with evil done in exquisitely and sometimes brutally by good!
In conclusion, Policape ought to be read and heard! He is ultimately the exemplary storyteller. Since childhood, he has been a teller of both short and tall tales, and he has always had a propensity towards and a love for metaphors. They squeeze him between the canvas of reality and idealism. Since he was born into a rich, cultural heritage like Haiti, he has been a recipient of a wonderful array of stories and images. However, in early adulthood, he started to spin his own stories and create his own poetry words from his experiences first in Haiti and then later, in the United States. Happy stories, but also painful, tragic stories; stories and image-emotions of the misery and solidarity in poverty, the fear and courage against political and existential violence, the almost unforgivable perversion of justice and equality in Haiti, and the real and shallow illusions of American success for immigrants and their offspring. If you stay with Policape long enough, he will tell your story by telling his story. This very fine and beautiful writer can not be forced into little boxes of literary conceit or acceptance. The explosive range of his experiences, his observations and knowledge, his flaws and insights, his humility and self-assurance, demands a larger diversity. And happily and boldly, Policape has embraced that kind of artistic democracy in expressing our earth-bound and transcendent lives.