Gabeba Baderoon’s The History of Intimacy traces one woman’s journey into writing. The winner of numerous awards, the collection reflects on the delicate, risky terrain of art, politics, and love in postapartheid South Africa.
Mother Tongue is the third collection of poems by Zimbabwean poet and writer Tsitsi Ella Jaji, whose previous work includes the poetry collections Beating the Graves and Carnaval and the book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.
As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future.
As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes...
