For these poets, there are more questions than answers, and there are no easy labels or solutions. Each gifts us something better: the struggle to find identities, relations, meanings, and the struggle for a language that can do heavy lifting. Many of the poems grapple with the meaning of family and connection with others, with what we can find in God and what may be needed of us to answer that call properly. In “All Those Losses” by Prosper Ifeanyi there is compassion and poignancy around a family’s past and present. Sarah Yanni writes about a father who gave up music to support his family, asks his child if she writes poems about him, which she responds “no, words / are not enough, too hard / but what I mean is there is too much aching here / and the music is too silent.” Lola Oh uses simple language to reveal the subtle relational complexities in a family in “The Fishmonger.” In Nicole Adabunu’s “God Gets Caught Sobbing Uncontrollably in His Hands,” an inversion of roles (God wracked with guilt) is sustained wonderfully, plus we get the fantastic line: “How all this blood amounts to nothing.” Many lines have stayed with me for days, and are with me as I write now. From the blunt power of Rutendo Chichaya’s “Who is allowed to breathe?”; the complex and glorious concluding image, complete with a Donne-style pun, in “Mosquito Bite” by Chinuzoke Chinuwa, to the complex world, richly on the edge of the surreal that we are almost lost in, offered by Brian Gyamfi. Please read for yourselves and take pleasure in these poets who have found their voices, and in the immense variety of ways African poetry flourishes.

– Len Verwey, Loving the Dying

In an ailing world, these poems are testament that the cure is in our hearts and the heart is always Africa. These are poems that travel far and wide but always find out: “every road leads to our doorknob.” Even in the face of loss, of escape, of genocide, these are poems that still find gardens to tend and hands, even burnt hands, are enlivened. This is an anthology of how we might go beyond resilience and into nurturing the space where we are safe.

– Marwa Helal, Ante body