You wear silence sitting on the concrete floor of a library a shroud like speech Language does not belong to you… An honest exploration of dislocation and (un)belonging in its forms: exile from language, exile from country, and exile from sanity. In her debut collection of poetry, Ndoro divides and intermingles national and personal history in an attempt to reach herself. Within its fragmented prose and lyrical poems, Agringanda is not only a celebrated capture of language but also of its intriguing subversion as it navigates meetings of class, gender, nationality and race.
An honest exploration of dislocation and (un)belonging in its forms: exile from language, exile from country, and exile from sanity. In her debut collection of poetry, Ndoro divides and intermingles national and personal history in an attempt to reach herself. Within its fragmented prose and lyrical poems, Agringanda is not only a celebrated capture of language but also of its intriguing subversion as it navigates meetings of class, gender, nationality and race.
What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.
In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature - and modes of literary thinking - as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation and the commodification of difference under a regime of global capitalism, at another end renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts within the crucible of connected histories allow for defamiliarising perspectives both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity.
The Only Magic We Know is a celebration of all the poets Modjaji has published. This anthology offers a taste of the range and diversity of the poems that have appeared in the individual poets collections.
"Chatora gives us an honest account of the migrant's experiences in a world that seeks to silence him. Diaspora Dreams is simultaneously suffocating and isolating. Battle after battle, the reader is constantly thrown into the unforgiving world of a black man in a white man's world." - Tariro Ndoro, Author Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner. Diaspora Dreams is Andrew Chatora's debut novella. It details the life and struggles of Kundai Mafirakureva, a Zimbabwean immigrant living in the United Kingdom. When Kundai departs a failing Zimbabwe for the greener pastures of England, he is convinced that his luck will immediately change. Yet what he finds in the UK convinces him that all that glitters is not always gold. Chatora takes us on a journey that acquaints us with Thames Valley, where Kundai must negotiate his place and his voice in a world where African men are not welcome. Set against the backdrop of petty classroom squabbles that constantly remind Kundai of his lower status as an immigrant, Diaspora Dreams exposes the tensions of working in the diaspora. The pressures of Britain also bear down on Kundai's family and relationships, threatening, in the words of du Bois, to "tear his soul asunder."
"I'm gonna tell you all about it, Mom. I'm gonna tell it like I'm on the end of your bed, talking to you. I'm not gonna cover up, cause there's no need. You'll see how it's all a flippin miracle. The whole weird year. It's only one year in my life, Ma, but it's all the stuff you slept through when I was a kid. All the stuff you fished through when you got up. I'm warning you, Ma, this is the truth." Startling poetry in the grittiest of emotional word go ... raw, tender and laugh-out-loud Whiplash digs its nail into you from the funny - a kickarse gem of a book. Told with landscapes, Whiplash puts Farren on the map as a wordsmith of astonishing talent.
Strange Fruit is a courageous debut with a remarkable range in theme and tone, from the nostalgic to the comedic to the bawdy, and to the angry, the melancholic and the steadfast and comforting. It will delight, shock, anger, induce laughter, shock more, delight more. And make you blush. It's a full range. There are poems of brutally honest self-scrutiny - the heart of the collection being a series of poems on the ageing body, loss of love and infertility - and there are poems that capture landscapes with imagist skill and the botanist's detail.
These deeply felt poems are at once plain-speaking and alive with complexity; Galgut's elegant response to both pain and loveliness is inspiring. Elisa Galgut teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. She has a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her poetry has appeared in local literary journals and anthologies. She lives in Cape Town.
No Ruined Stone is a verse sequence rooted in the life of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1786, Burns arranged to migrate to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation, a plan he ultimately abandoned. Voiced by a fictive Burns and his fictional granddaughter, a "mulatta" passing for white, the book asks: what would have happened had he gone?
