20:35 AFRICA is a beautifully arranged volume of poetry that explores the complexities of being African/African Diaspora/being a people of the globe, navigating our many experiences from all corners of the world. Through each poem, one sees a people cleansing themselves, a body that defies definition as a single group. The volume is filled with such powerful poems, including, “Self Portrait as Brenda Fassie,” the poem that opens the volume with such fresh lines like, “Borrow yourself to happiness/You wanna be loved. You just wanna be loved/…” or as another author in the collection says, “All our wounds begin from the same place. Sometimes, the grief we carry/ is better than the one we deserve…/” As if all of us are one people, writing the one poem about our one existence, over and over, each poet does what a poet is supposed to do, unsettling things, or finding the unsettling things around us. There in these poems are a quest for answers, as in “Mosque at Hadejia,” where the poet draws us into the presence of God by exploring the silence of that very God in the haunting lines, “What I understand of God is/ His Silence…/ or “You see, I thirst for little clarities;/ for syntax in the great chaos/.”

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. These are some of the finest poems I have ever read from the youngest among us, and how fresh, how mind-boggling, how urgent each line, each word.  They belong on every shelf, in every library, in everyone’s heart.

– Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems

These are gorgeous poems, lush and haunting, full of tenderness and life: rendering the beauty of joy and nightlife, of Brenda Fassie, of loss and its sorrowful rumination. They delve into the fragility of black boyhood, the dangers, the pleasures, the joys and the tests in the periphery. Visceral and aching with physicality, this anthology holds poems about love and its sweetness as well as the desperation of those who have lost their homes and life. Hopeful poems, scanning the earth for signs of life, invoking music and the voice of God: “What music is that? I say, give me your hand. / You are already dancing.” Some poems are prayers, others a declaration of survival.

– Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head