The volume ushers us into the presence of that longing everyone knows within their skin, sometimes, denying, but a longing we however carry forever, and uncovering that longing, that pain, the ironies that define us, we find healing. Each poem takes us on a journey we must navigate, whether it be a persona piece deconstructing the “Brenda Fassie” the poet sees or that of the lone worshiper seeking to find God.

The range and reach of poets, against the range and reach of the individual aesthetics is impressive. It’s the kind of volume that one hopes hotels and even restaurants will leave in guest rooms, tucked beneath dusty Bibles, or folded into menus. What a discovery and surprise that would be.

From Africa and its diaspora, poets spin beauty into images that rain their urgent message to humanity in the throes of a moral drought. In a range of styles, these poems explore and expand English to resonate the multiplicity of African voices. From the minuscule yet significant placement of every comma, every line break, the breath of these poems speaks to the heart, to the mind, to the soul.

Across the collection, history is made as personal as it is national, home is both longed for and interrogated, languages are cajoled and questioned, and love shows its many faces as intimacy, as inter-generational memory and as worship. Poetry’s old friend ‘Grief’ underwrites large swaths of this anthology.

The 30 poems collected in this anthology ask the reader to enter a landscape of art and imagination through a variety of carefully bounded landscapes. The originary impulses vary from poet to poet, but, collectively, the poems amplify a realm of postcolonial experiences in ways all physical, psychic and visceral.

The poets here are in love with words and the fractured worlds they live in. The poems are at once sublime yet political, global but rooted and contradiction is the border they call home.