In the prologue to Safiya Sinclair’s astounding new memoir, she describes a turning point at the end of her turbulent teenage years in which she’s standing on the veranda of her family’s home in Bickersteth, Jamaica, looking out toward the sea.

With a wounded heart and rattled soul after yet another murderous outburst from her dangerously mercurial and controlling Rastafari father, Sinclair thinks about what would surely become her bleak future if she stayed in this place “where I would watch the men in my family grow mighty while the women shrunk.” She didn’t know when or how she would do it, but she makes the decision to leave.

“After years of diminishment under his shadow, I refused to shrink anymore,” she writes of this moment of reckoning. “At nineteen years old, all my fear had finally given way to fire.”

这是一个恰当的介绍一个自己的故事fierce, honest and utterly absorbing that it’s impossible to put down. In “How to Say Babylon,” Sinclair uses that fire she found so long ago to pen a powerful portrait of a young woman cleaving her way out of hardship to wield a mighty voice all her own.

Though she describes her father as one “who slept with one watchful eye on my purity and one hand on his black machete,” neither he nor his wrath fully dominates the narrative. Instead, from the get-go, Sinclair writes from a position of agency and fortitude — and, perhaps surprisingly, of love.

Over the first few emotionally balanced chapters, she describes her parents’ initial courtship, their attraction to the Rastafari lifestyle as a rejection of the hedonistic Western values of “Babylon” and an escape from the mistreatment of Black Jamaicans in a postcolonial society, her father’s success as a sought-after reggae musician in Jamaica and abroad, and the family’s early years when Sinclair and her siblings “lived in a noisy tangle” in a hillside community overlooking Montego Bay.

“Here, where he was godhead and architect of our new world, he would create the purest Rasta family,” she writes of the family’s seemingly idyllic time in Bogue Heights. “When he was with us we walked taller, and there was no better way to love him than to be as mighty as he imagined us to be.”

Not long after, however, the family’s fortunes changed. After her father’s record deal fell through and he was relegated to playing hokey gigs at schmaltzy tourist spots, his mood soured permanently and a new reign of terror ensued, stalking Sinclair through her rocky years as a social outcast in middle and high school, a quick stint trying out a modeling career despite her father’s disapproval, and on into her early adulthood.

“Over time we grew barnacled and kelped, accustomed to riding the chaotic surf of our parents’ shifting whims,” she writes of this time.

Yet, despite the near-constant threat of her father’s fury and his telling her she was “worthless,” Sinclair found a source of strength that would soon become her path to freedom: words: “In the chaos of our rented house, under a borrowed moon, I discovered that a poem was order. It was certainty. And, for the first time, it seemed possible for me to write my way out.”

From that point forward, like an arrow laced with fire, Sinclair unleashed her gift onto the world, first as a mentee to an esteemed (albeit lecherous) Trinidadian poet, then as an undergraduate and graduate student in the United States. Eventually, her efforts paid off, earning her much acclaim across the world, including a Whiting Award for her 2016 poetry collection, “Cannibal.”

Sinclair started writing “How to Say Babylon” in 2013. It shows, the time and space she took to let it — and the swollen history it represents — breathe. She writes with the command of a seasoned author — her plump, emotive sentences igniting and caressing each page.

In one of the most memorable scenes in the book, Sinclair’s mother gives Sinclair her first book of poems, showing her “how poetry could cast a light on a meager world and make it boundless … how pain could be transformed into something beautiful.”

Boundless and beautiful and all the rest, “How to Say Babylon” is, in a word, a triumph.

Alexis Burling is a freelance writer.

Correction:An earlier version of this review misstated the nationality of a mentor to Safiya Sinclair. He was Trinidadian.