Both considered and contemporary, this is promising and exciting verse that gestures to place, language, and movement. Between these pages English is global and plural, and both literary and literal landscapes are determined from within.

These poems live, as all poems do, in language, but they are also alive too and not distanced from the everyday and the local. They leap from ‘the country running behind my feet’, to the ‘blue miracle’ of water, even as they consider what speech signifies when we choose to say: ‘merci / thank you /… and never / shukran’. Some of the contributing poets such as Clifton Gachagua, Hiwot Adilow and Busisiwe Mahlangu may be familiar to readers but perhaps this third anthology of African poets between the ages of 20 and 35 has achieved exactly what it ought to: offering us an engaging, insightful and imaginative introduction to continentally and globally new voices. These twenty-three poets rise to the occasion with preoccupations as disparate and connected as one would hope for from any collection featuring a perceptive and keenly intelligent coterie.

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. Even as they eat and archive, wait and agitate, these poets are not afraid to reflect on the place and moment they are in, proclaiming that ‘Geometry has put our home at the centre of the world: Grief’s Capitol. & suddenly / All the flowers are sick’.

These poems are far from singular in their aesthetic ambitions and they reveal an unwavering attentiveness to everything from personal hurt to the symbolism of plants. But what may yet constitute this anthology’s true value are all these magnificent signs of listening before telling.

— Tjawangwa Dema