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. These poems rehearse a continent’s logics of survival, the sense that self-discovery is a vista for harried voices. The poets count wounds and injuries, tallying the cost of growth, they break upon stones, knowing a scar is a language, watch sun relapsing orbit, index laughter, watch God’s face multiply, through the rattle of the haunted, mark themselves alive in the deluge of stars and bones.

These poems are indeed dark – they have mostly turned inwards, to personal moments and spaces: desire and failure, grief and estrangement, dysfunctions and motivation, love’s lost mysteries – but they are also deft and dutiful, making demands of encounters and observations, calling for meaning in meditation, probing the underbellies of a peculiar modernity, the epistemic relations between self and society, between self and others, between self and the unpredictable forces of history.

Although the governing principle of most of the poems here is the rooted “I of the Beholder,” the refracted structures of personal representations also crystallize the fundamental truth of every writer’s ultimate quest: the translation of the self which is also the translation of the milieu.

– Peter Akinlabi

20.35 Africa includes an array of poetic presences convinced of their aesthetics, arguments, and peculiarities. There’s harmony in the selections here: memory and the dense air of forgetting, cross-Atlantic yearning, restrained dissatisfaction, and nostalgia made distinct by youthful questioning, by a melancholy some speakers are learning how to settle into. But / Longing is not living. (Kondwa Rayne) Each poet, each speaker resists flattening in their own cadence. Nights turn over to days, there’s fogginess but also clearings, moments of radical declaration. In the opening poem, Momtaza Mehri writes: Yes. It is arrogant to think you are the problem. But it has to be one of us / and it isn’t me. I don’t make the rules. I am made by them. These poets take and freak tradition, every education touched by colonial failures of thought. I adopt your ruins. Oubah Osman continues on: We / Recede into each other in the place where stories reside. These poems encourage a vision of the books that will emerge in the next few years. I can imagine the poets who will welcome them quoting: I threw a couple of amens / out of the window. (Sinaso Mxakaza) Here is the chorus singing back “Amen!” before their own new songs.

– Ladan Osman