To write from the continent today is to stand at a crossroads – where memory meets imagination, where elegy and emergence share the same breath. This anthology is not a map but a field recording: voices emerging from silence, desire braided with loss, faith threaded through doubt, and language stretched to its breaking point. Here, poetry is not escape – it is engagement. These poems confront ghosts, name longings, and bend form to house the contradictions of living and writing from Africa now.
These poems dig into the familial – seeking an individual self alongside lineage and belonging(s). In Chiagoziem Jideofor’s work, the heavy inheritance is embodied, genetic. Family is “a progressive campaign” connecting present to future (“Willingness”). The poet speaks to inherited trauma, bones passed down like unfinished sentences. Solape Adetutu Adeyemi’s “Jalopy” is less concerned with descendance, more with duty and debt – the “we” of this poem resounds in the reader’s memory. Other poems blur the line between ancestry and belief. The charge of heritage links the bravery of language with its failure to define. Felix Eshiet’s “Ballad of an Ibibio Poet” poignantly calls forth “A name older than my father’s father’s father. / A secret the folktales never told.”
Belief, too, is not a static possession but a trembling inquiry. In “Agnostic,” Ọbáfẹ́mi Thanni writes: “my foolish heart – home of first doubts – silenced,” capturing how spiritual longing can coexist with rupture. Jasmine Tabor’s “My Shift Begins at 7PM” reveals a quieter devotion – an everyday holiness that gathers in the stillness between worship and work, between velvet pews and rolled-up sleeves. God, here, is neither sermon nor certainty but saturation. These poets do not evangelise. Instead, they inhabit faith’s hinterlands: the night shift, the prayer whispered in a lower-church bathroom, the cold where “your silence” becomes its own kind of scripture. Even rebellion, as in Paul Damilare’s “Rebellion on Lent Morning,” is a spiritual act: “the morning is God’s making; the night my unmaking.” These are not testimonies – they are questions sung into the silence, improvisations that carry faith not as doctrine, but as a desire to be met.
The poets also use lyric as mourning ashes, uncovering griefs both public and private. “When Hugh Masekela died / I thought of you,” writes Hiwot Adilow in “Feeling Fucked Up.” Loss here is not pure but multilateral, tangled with desire, rage, renunciation. The expectation of elegy is refused as language leans aggressive and profane. A bereaved voice, a banished music – and yet the longing never leaves. Adilow’s speaker remains “desperate for the electric buzz / of your attention.” These poems reach thirstily for the lost, the dead, the desired.
To write from Africa is often to write beside ghosts. This anthology teems with hauntings – familial, political, ancestral. In “Towards the End,” Naomi Nduta Waweru catalogues dust and memory, echo and disintegration: “your bones disintegrated / into shards / like porcelain.” These poets sit in the ruins and let the echoes speak. Memory isn’t memorial – it’s unfinished mourning. Even love, as in “Patrice,” becomes spectral, folded through timelines and imagined conversations with Lumumba in a moonlit room. History is not to be put down but dressed differently for the future, speaking to its own definition. “We’ll hopefully continue to talk about loss & giggle.” The hope is not optimistic but announces a truth of dwelling with ghosts. These poems show that our shadows – historical, personal, and metaphysical – are not obstacles to clarity. They are the material of it.
This anthology is a polyrhythmic ensemble. The range is exhilarating: the sensual synaesthesia of Catherine McNaught Davis, the incantatory charge of Chinaza James-Ibe, the performative fragmentation of Edoziem Miracle’s “Addiction II” Form is flexible, ungoverned by convention. Instead of homogeneity, we get vibrancy: hybrid forms, haibun, list poems, near-psalms, sonic ruptures. Even within a single voice, we encounter multiplicity – irony beside sincerity, fury beside elegy. This variety is not a lack of coherence but an ethics of refusal. These poets resist simplification – of themselves or their contexts. In that refusal, they offer a richer, riskier music. There is a kind of formal sovereignty here – one that insists language must stretch to meet the life that births it.
The poems in this volume are poised between historical consciousness and contemporary concern. Writing on memory, on martyrdom and migration, they reckon with power structures in the surrounding struggles and collapse. They weave language into vessels that grieve and resist and autonomously negotiate with communal heritage. Frameworks of colonially inherited religion become remoulded and personalised, holding belief in tension with transgression and doubt. The urgency of these intimations speaks to the complexity of today’s young African poets: how they construct (and deconstruct) imaginations of identity and belonging, duty and dreams, in language.
Sarah Lubala
Logan February
