In this electrifying debut poetry collection--written with the ferocity of Rita Dove's groundbreaking Thomas and Beulah--a critically acclaimed award-winning talent explores a wide range of emotions, from anxiety to ecstasy reflecting the moon's phases, from Waning Gibbous to Full.

Both intimate and intricately structured Tramaine Suubi's remarkable work is inspired by the moon--its phases' effects on water, the Earth, and our bodies. Phases relishes in the beauty of change, even that caused by heartbreak. Suubi's refreshing, vulnerable verse begs to be underlined, memorized, and shared; each of her poems operate as love letters to the cyclical healing that occurs in nature, in our bodies, and in the bodies that have come before us.

A rich, joyful collection of poems on living and loving from the Booker Prize-winning author.

Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world. In this powerful collection, the celebrated novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet Ben Okri explores the beauty contained in each one of us--the freedom of our spirit, the child within. He recalls the death of his father, the sacrifices of his mother, the hidden river of Edinburgh, falling in love. He writes about Virgil and Mozambique, about ringing the bell for freedom, the dreams of Calliope and the full moon. He enters the fifth circle, sings of the roses of spring, and aligns the pyramids to the magic stars.

This is a gorgeous, exciting collection for everyone who loves Ben Okri's vibrant style, and a perfect introduction to new readers of his poetry.

Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Translation

Mahmoud Darwish was that rare literary phenomenon: a poet both acclaimed by critics as one of the most important poets in the Arab world and beloved by his readers.

His language--lyrical and tender--helped to transform modern Arabic poetry into a living metaphor for the universal experiences of exile, loss, and identity. The poems in this collection, constructed from the cadence and imagery of the Palestinian struggle, shift between the most intimate individual experience and the burdens of history and collective memory.

Brilliantly translated by Fady Joudah, If I Were Another--which collects the greatest epic works of Darwish's mature years--is a powerful yet elegant work by a master poet that demonstrates why Darwish was one of the most celebrated poets of his time and was hailed as the voice and conscience of an entire people.

Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets
2018 Arab American Book Award Winner, Poetry

A taut debut collection of heartfelt poems.--Publishers Weekly

In her dedication Safia Elhillo writes, The January Children are the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1. What follows is a deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one's own land.

The January Children depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan's history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the asmarani--an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds.

No longer content to accept manmade borders, Elhillo navigates a new and reimagined world. Maintaining a sense of wonder in multiple landscapes and mindscapes of perpetually shifting values, she leads the reader through a postcolonial narrative that is equally terrifying and tender, melancholy and defiant.

I Would Begin with Normally: ATOM's Journey to Soaring Heights, is a reflection of author Odera Macfoy Akachukwu's life. It's not just a retelling of events but a journey through struggles, triumphs, and the lessons he's learned along the way. At its heart, this book is about resilience and the beauty of embracing what makes us different. It weaves together several layers: the author's own story, the biblical journey of Joseph, and a collection of poetry and introspective thoughts that give it a deeply personal touch. It's part memoir, part fiction, and part self-discovery.

The story begins by exploring Akachukwu's early years in Nigeria and challenges in academics. Not knowing he had dyslexia, the author felt like an outsider and often questioned his worth, intelligence, and place in the world. Despite the struggles, he always had a strong family support system. Books became his refuge, a place where he could escape and imagine a world where he wasn't limited by what others thought he couldn't do.

In the book, Akachukwu uses the story of Joseph from the Bible as a parallel to his own journey. Joseph faced betrayal, hardship, and so many setbacks, but he never let go of his dreams. Like Joseph, the author had moments where he felt like he was in a pit, wondering how he'd ever climb out. But those moments taught him resilience and showed that even in the darkest times, there's a way forward if you keep pushing.

The story also touches on universal themes: overcoming adversity, the importance of self-belief, and the power of community. It's about taking the challenges life throws at you and turning them into stepping stones instead of stumbling blocks. It's about dreaming big, even when the world tells you to play small.

By the end of the book, the message is clear: no matter where you start, no matter what obstacles you face, you can soar. You can take the very things that people say make you less than and use them to become more. That's what I've done, and it's what I hope readers will take away from my story. Odera Macfoy Akachukwu

The artistry of QUESTIONS FOR ADA defies words, embodying the pain, the passion, and the power of love rising from the depths of our souls. Ijeoma Umebinyuo's poetry is a flower that will blossom in the spirit of every reader as she shares her heart with raw candor. From lyrical lushness to smoky sensuality to raw truths, this tome of transforming verse is the book every woman wants to write but can't until the broken mirrors of their lives have healed. In this gifted author's own words-I am too full of life to be half-loved. A bold celebration of womanhood.

In his moving debut collection, Musawenkosi Khanyile speaks for the heartache, perseverance and untriumphant triumph of township life. Through snapshots and memories of family and community, centred around the boy- and young manhood of a single narrator, All The Places is a rare and compelling poetic Bildungsroman, with the ambition and scope of a novel, paired with (and pared down to) minimalist and clear-eyed verse.

Concurrently original and quintessentially South African, these poems mark Khanyile out as a skilled stylist and storyteller - a frank and important new voice in South African literature.

2023 Julie Suk Award Winner
2024 Nebraska Book Award Winner
2024 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Poetry
2024 Midwest Book Award Finalist in Poetry
Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry shortlist

Like I knew, standing
on the seashore, the hunger
wracking a migrant's body
is movement.
--from Romeo Oriogun's Migrant by the Sea

The Gathering of Bastards chronicles the movement of migrants as they navigate borders both internal and external. At the heart of these poems of vulnerability and sharp intelligence, the poet himself is the perpetual migrant embarked on forced journeys that take him across nations in West and North Africa, through Europe, and through American cities as he navigates the challenges of living through terror and loss and wrestles with the meaning of home.

The first book of poems from an acclaimed young author, whose meteoric rise has already landed them on the cover of Time Magazine.

In their bold debut poetry collection, Akwaeke Emezi--award-winning author of Freshwater, PET, The Death of Vivek Oji, and Dear Senthuran--imagines a new depth of belonging. Crafted of both divine and earthly materials, these poems travel from home to homesickness, tracing desire to surrender and abuse to survival, while mapping out a chosen family that includes the son of god, mary auntie, and magdalene with the chestnut eyes. Written from a spiritfirst perspective and celebrating the essence of self that is impossible to drown, kill, or reduce, Content Warning: Everything distills the radiant power and epic grief of a mischievous and wanting young deity, embodied.

Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are among the most successful African literary works. Song of Lawino is an African woman's lamentation over the cultural death of her western educated husband - Ocol. In Song of Ocel the husband tries to justify his cultural apostasy. These songs were translated from Acholi by the author. They evince a fascinating flavour of the African rhythmical idiom.

In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet, where the Sahel rises in you, in me / the Red Sea boils in you, in me / Nunvut is melting in you, in me. This translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson preserves the rich musicality of the original French, as well as its frequent use of wordplay and often unusual word choice.

Waberi, a nomad at heart, takes us on a whirlwind tour across North America, Africa, and Europe, daring us to love the earth beyond all rational thought and to turn into earth, both literally and figuratively, as we turn from vanity, fears, and other pointless rustling. These lyrical, playful, and moving poems urge us to look for the truth and beauty hidden in our daily lives, singing of Waberi's own enduring love for our endangered planet and also, more forcefully, exhorting us to join him in the collective fight to save our planet from destruction.

Through a personal, historical, and political lens, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to the collective experiences inherited through deeply-rooted ancestry, tracing patterns of movement and migration, sorrow and invisibility, and the resulting complicated notions of home.
In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and land. With momentum, giving name to everything in her path from the longing that comes with migration to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors past, present, and future. Shiferraw writes unapologetically against erasure, against invisibility, instead creating a space that holds grief lovingly, that can tend to the wounds held and held in the endlessly-traveling body. Brilliant with abundance and texture, Shiferraw's poems dismantle the empire's sterile use of language, both historical and present.

In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Mahtem Shiferraw builds a home within her poems, attentively naming those who exist within them out of invisibility and into the radiant light: We walk / in unison too: our backs bending at once, / our arms breaking, our abdomens / kicked into silence, thighs bleeding. Through / this I ask; am I still lit? And they, again /...what else would you be-

Where does all the grief go when it's not tugging at your wrist? Enyegue's debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health.

This collection does not aim to heal anyone who reads it, but instead help them confront their own healing. Rather than sugar-coated bullets that enter you lightly, these poems are designed to hurt. They are for the girls with difficult names, the boys with softness at their core, and the people with neither. They are meant for the people who are Black, and the people who are not--because we are all tethered together by the heaviness of the human experience.

If the question is America-and by extension, who is and what does it mean to be American? -AFRICANAMERICAN'T offers no answers. The CAN'T in the title suggests impossibility and that is precisely what the book is interested in. Even in the so-called land of opportunity, some things remain impossible for its speaker(s). In a way, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country. However valid despair might be as a response to the continued failings of his two countries, Ayokunle Falomo traverses the distance between betrayal and love in an attempt to find poetry-and perhaps, something like hope-in all the places it can't be found.



A bold, mesmerizing debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures

Renowned for her storytelling and spoken-word artistry, Ama Asantewa Diaka is also an exultant, fierce, and visceral poet whose work leaves a lasting impact.

Touching on themes from perceptions of beauty to the betrayals of the body, from what it means to give consent to how we grapple with demons internal and external, Woman, Eat Me Whole is an entirely fresh and powerful look at womanhood and personhood in a shifting world. Moving between Ghana and the United States, Diaka probes those countries' ever-changing cultural expectations and norms while investigating the dislocation and fragmentation of a body--and a mind--so often restless or ill at ease.

Vivid and bodily while also deeply cerebral, Woman, Eat Me Whole is a searing debut collection from a poet with an inimitable voice and vision.

Embarquez dans un voyage poignant au coeur de l'Afrique et de l'essence de l'humanité avec QUELQUE CHOSE À DIRE - une collection captivante de poésie s'étendant sur deux décennies. Ce livre n'est pas seulement une oeuvre littéraire; c'est un récipient portant la passion et la patience d'une vie en harmonie et en dissonance avec le monde.

Des chemins nostalgiques de Danané aux salles académiques de Trois-Rivières, en passant par le décor romantique de Paris, chaque poème est une empreinte dans l'odyssée du poète. Bamako se révèle dans les vers non pas comme un lieu, mais comme le battement de coeur d'une mère patrie qui converse avec l'âme naïve autant qu'expérimentée.

QUELQUE CHOSE À DIRE aborde les pluies qui perturbent les cours, le vacarme du Grand Marché de Bamako, et les violences faites aux femmes qui sévissent en Afrique. C'est une réponse courageuse aux insultes morales infligées aux démunis et un cri contre les injustices subies par les enfants oubliés des rues.

Cette collection est une ode à l'amour et une condamnation de l'animosité humaine, exposant des réflexions sur des atrocités historiques, de la traite transatlantique des esclaves aux horreurs infligées par des figures telles que Hitler et Léopold II. Elle se plonge dans les ombres de l'apartheid et les blessures de nations telles que le Rwanda, la Sierra Leone, et le Libéria.

Pourtant, au milieu de cette obscurité, QUELQUE CHOSE À DIRE est un témoignage de la puissance inébranlable de la parole écrite. C'est une confirmation que l'amour est en effet le commandement du poète et la force ultime qui peut dénoncer ou guérir.

Trouverez-vous votre voix dans l'écho de ces poèmes ? Découvrez un monde où même dans la maladie, il y a de la santé; au milieu de la folie, il y a de la raison. Pour quiconque est originaire d'Afrique ou qui a une affinité pour ses vastes expériences, ne pas avoir QUELQUE CHOSE À DIRE est comme une existence non revendiquée.

Levez les yeux vers le ciel bleu avec les yeux de l'innocence enfantine et demandez: Où va ce monde d'adultes ? Dans ces pages, vous pourriez juste trouver la réponse.

Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa's second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile's new and collected works spans almost fifty years.

During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz. Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile's prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world--and did.

Sarah Lubala's debut collection of poetry, A History of Disappearance, centres on the experiences of those living on the margins, particularly girls and women. The opening poem, 6 Errant Thoughts on Being a Refugee, for which Lubala was shortlisted for the prestigious Gerald Kraak Award, sets the tone for this important collection.

The 56 poems span themes such as forced migration, gender-violence, xenophobia, race, mental illness, love, and belonging. The notion of disappearance runs like a thread through each of them, not only as an event, but, as Lubala describes it in an interview with OkayAfrica, also as a structure of experience. Lubala writes in taut, bare sentences, potent in their lyrical beauty. Every word is exact and necessary, none are superfluous. Many of her poems read like prayers, and indeed this is a word that returns again and again in the collection. In spite of the adversity her speakers face, they refuse to remain silent. Each of their voices shines through the language, loud with resistance. Her poems navigate the pain of displacement, loss, absence, and grief with empathy and care.

Lublala has said of her work that she hopes to expand the moral imagination of her readers. She achieves just this, confronting the reader with the human face, obliging us to look and imagine beyond the margins of our own experience.

WINNER OF THE 2021 WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS--ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS POEMS IN TRANSLATION CONTEST

No Gods Live Here, the first book-length collection by a woman from São Tomé to appear in English, is grounded in the lush islands' history of slavery, colonialism, and independence.

A career-spanning collection from giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country's past alongside the poet's own childhood poems set against the tiny island nation's distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place.

Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis.

Each poem captures the resilience and ugliness of prejudice. - Dr Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka

Lawrence Mduduzi Ndlovu has assembled an essential anthology on race and racism. It chronicles the plethora of race-based prejudices that seem to be an ingredient of our very being as humans. Devoid of anger, even as it is so impassioned, this collection is a very worthwhile read and singularly relevant for contemporary, global society. - Mavuso Msimang

In a time when the struggle is between the responsibility of remembering and the danger of forgetting, we are called to conscientiousness. In this book, Ndlovu bottles the tension between memory and the forging of a future in the most delicate way. Not only does he boast exquisite talents as a writer, but he also makes a gallant attempt to remind us about what is now at stake. - Xhanti Payi