Last Night in Tawargha – Salawu Olajide
Last night, just like many nightsunder a blue shed, a blue horror was going on.Whatever happens to the characters
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Guest Editors: Safia Elhillo and Gbenga Adesina
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
In 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry we see the august breadth of an African poetics that dominates the space of intersections; intersections of geography, language, gender, faith… The poems gathered here are insights into the possibilities that take shape when we bridge our cultural specificities with a dedication to craft and aesthetic vision. These poems reach well beyond the continent and her diasporas and into the intimate spaces of every reader who encounters them.
– Matthew Shenoda, Professor – Rhode Island School of Design and author of Tahrir Suite: Poems
With poems ranging from interrogations of the nature of borders and the legacies of colonialism to questions of nationhood and ethnicity; reflections on gender and identity to legacies of personal trauma and national violence, the editors of 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry have taken care to select a wide variety of themes and voices that reflect the myriad experiences of young African writers coming of age. The best poetry awakens language to distinct possibilities before unimagined; here, with lyrical language both hauntingly visceral and evocatively imagistic, these young African writers do just that.
– Hope Wabuke, Professor – University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of Movement No.1: Trains
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. The publication of this anthology boldly marks a before and after moment in the African literary tradition and it leaves me feeling humbled, lucky and blessed to be a witness.
– Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Professor – Cornell University and author of Nairobi Heat & Logotherapy
Last night, just like many nightsunder a blue shed, a blue horror was going on.Whatever happens to the characters
I do not want to write how lonely a car parked under the rain in a deserted road sings, but
Partly because my stepfather-to-be three counties awaytexted her good morning and partly because the radioannounced the reunion tour happening
i am from blanket parachutes made out of midnight storms & city lights guiding 5 o’clock rush hours whether i
At the end of the night, I peel this country off my skin I peel the other one too I
I was an undergraduate when I first noticed the visibility gap between fiction and poetry in contemporary African literature. I’d
The poems we have curated in this anthology are electric, unruly, charged with desire and melancholies. They are intensely private
And then peeling the turmeric, I said, as a girl- boy, I came upon a little dirty- grey bird on
(for Aleppo) Ogodo paints dead bodies, they are now many in his gallery: he has used lungs of fireflies, and
i understand howclocks work withbodies; mysister would tear her thigh with razors & force orange juiceinside.
My mother’s voice makes youThink of past warsWhen she tells you to stir the soup,It’s as though she’s teachingYou
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