In our regular Book Digest segment, we wrap up book news for our readers with books from Siphokazi Jonas, Anthony Joseph, Scola Moraa, Kwame Dawes, and Chris Abani. This week, our focus is poetry by writers of African descent that is already in the market or forthcoming.
When Love Says Goodbye by Scholastica Moraa
Publisher: Mvua Press
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Nuria
Scolastica Moraa
Scholastica Moraa is an Actuarial Science graduate currently pursuing a Master of Business Administration at Mount Kenya University but has an undeniable passion for poetry and stories. She has published a collection of poems titled Beautiful Mess and When Love Says Goodbye which have also been translated into Italian. She has coauthored poetry collections titled Dreams and Demons and This Heart of Mine. She is the 2022 Kendeka Prize for African Literature winner and her work has been featured in reputable magazines such as the Konch Online Magazine and Imbiza. She was also long-listed for the Rachel Simiyu Creative Writers Awards 2024. She also writes for children. Her hobbies include reading, travelling, and learning new languages.
When Love Says Goodbye
This collection of poems showcases Scholastica Moraa’s creativity at its best. She expertly weaves her poems to present the full mix of love’s emotions: infatuation, commitment, frustration, bitterness, arousal and self-pity. She skillfully weaves these emotions into words, bringing to life the experience of her readers and many admirers — a poetic diary of the high moments of love as well as the depths of desperation when love grows cold and says goodbye….
Weeping Becomes a River by Siphokazi Jonas
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Date: September 1, 2024
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House South Africa
Siphokazi Jonas
Siphokazi Jonas is a South African poet, playwright and actor with an MA in English Literature and a BA in English and Drama. She was the 2016 runner-up for the national Sol Plaatje European Union Award and headlined as the first Featured Poet at the Poetry Africa Festival in 2021. Siphokazi received a Best Short Film South African Film and Television Award (SAFTA) as co-producer of the poetry film #WeAreDyingHere. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, Atlanta Review, Versopolis Review, The Poetry Society and Stanzas.
Weeping Becomes a River
Siphokazi Jonas is a weaver of seemingly discordant worlds; growing up in an Afrikaans dorpie, attending an English boarding school, and going on annual holidays to a village emaXhoseni during the transition years of South Africa’s democracy made this a necessity.
In Weeping Becomes a River she confronts the linguistic and cultural alienation experienced as a black learner in former Model C schools in the 1990s and early 2000s, then fashions the fragments to reclaim and rewrite her place within a lineage of storytellers.
Migrating between forms, between poetry and intsomi, she navigates the waters of tradition, religion, intergenerational experiences of rural and urban spaces, and the ways in which family dynamics affect the body. She is not only a referee of the raging tensions within her, but she also pieces together a language for pathways of leaving and returning.
Her poems grapple with the past, the present, and possible futures without forgetting that “the body is marked territory from birth, and the scent of it never leaves”.
Precious and Impossible by Anthony Joseph
Publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry
Date: September 26, 2024
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Bloomsbury Poetry
Anthony Joseph
Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Poetry. He is the author of four poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. As a musician, he has released nine critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.
Precious and Impossible
Featuring exclusive new work, Precious and Impossible gathers together over three decades of poetry from the T S Eliot Prize-winning Anthony Joseph.
With an introduction by Lauri Scheyer
For over three decades, Anthony Joseph’s work has explored the transnational vibrations of the African diaspora. Precious and Impossible brings together thirty years of Joseph’s poetry and lyrics – cementing his status as one of our greatest living poets and polymaths
Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani
Publisher: Akashic Books
Date: December 3, 2024
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Akashic Books, Penguin Random House Canada
Kwame Dawes
Kwame Dawes is the Ghana-born, award-winning author of twenty-two books of poetry—including Sturge Town from Norton—and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He has won Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and was the 2019 awardee of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series—the latest of which is Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set. He currently teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Chris Abani
Chris Abani, a Nigerian-born, award-winning poet and novelist, currently teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is the recipient of a PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim Award. He is the editor of Lagos Noir and the coeditor of Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set.
Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set
The limited-edition box set is a project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of up to a dozen chapbooks every year by African poets through Akashic Books. The series seeks to identify the best poetry written by African poets working today, and it is especially interested in featuring poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry. The nine poets included in this box set are Nurain Ọládèjì, Sarpong Osei Asamoah, Claudia Owusu, Nome Emeka Patrick, Qhali, Connor Cogill, Feranmi Ariyo, Dare Tunmise, and Adams Adeosun.
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