Welcome to the African Books Collective

Poetry Catalogue 2019

Recently, African Books Collective (ABC) has grown, adding a wealth of
poetry presses, particularly from South Africa. Poets from Africa have been
productive for many years, and throughout its 30 year history ABC has been
privileged to offer collections from such greats as Niyi Osundare, J.P. Clark,
Okot p’Bitek, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, Shaaban Robert, Syl Cheney-
Coker and Tanure Ojaide.
Poets have been self-organising, founding their own presses and publishing
their work and the work their contemporaries. Through the Collective, these
presses have a platform to share literary voices from the region with global
audiences. They are home to multiple voices, including those who are often
side-lined, sharing stories of identity, marginalisation, history and love – with
all its complexities. A list of poetry publishers can be found at the end of this
catalogue.
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Thanks for your time!

ABC
Agringada: Like
a gringa, like a
foreigner
Tariro Ndoro

You wear silence

sitting on the concrete floor of a library
a shroud like speech
Language does not belong to you…

An honest exploration of dislocation and (un)

belonging in its forms: exile from language, exile
from country, and exile from sanity. In her debut collection of poetry, Ndoro
divides and intermingles national and personal history in an attempt to reach
herself. Within its fragmented prose and lyrical poems, Agringada is not only a
celebrated capture of language but also of its intriguing subversion as it navigates
meetings of class, gender, nationality and race.

“Tariro Ndoro wields many tongues to give a testament of the innumerable ways
humans survive. She is not concerned with comforting you with hope: poems end
with severed limbs, and you too are dragged through southern African borders. She
leaves you panting, too afraid to stop for a sip of self-pity, and she has made you too
familiar with her foreignness to want belong disappears, yet, you are acutely aware
that you are alive.”
- Katleho Kano Shoro (Serurubele)

“A love song to language, and all her betrayals and liberations; a linguist’s dance
through political, psychological and psychic borders. My favourite 2019 read so far.”
- Megan Ross (Milk Fever)

Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean poet and storyteller. Born in

Harare but raised in a smattering of small towns, Tariro holds
a BSc in Microbiology and an MA in Creative Writing. Her
work has been published in numerous international journals
and anthologies including 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of
Contemporary Poetry (Brittle Paper, 2018) Kotaz, New Contrast, Oxford Poetry
and Puerto del Sol. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the 2018 Babishai Niwe
Poetry Prize and awarded second place for the 2017 DALRO Prize. Agringada is
her debut collection.

9781928215769 | 82pp. | 2019 | Modjaji Books, South Africa | $16/£12

1
All the Places
Musawenkosi Khanyile

All the places he goes to

remind him of where he comes from.
He cannot escape his background; it’s always with him.
Like now, seated at a long shiny table in a hotel
with colleagues who overlook his township English
and laugh kindly at his jokes.
He cannot look at his sparkling fork and knife
without thinking of holidays spent at his father’s birthplace
gathered around a huge bowl of maas with his cousins,
digging in with his hands.

In his moving debut collection, Musawenkosi Khanyile speaks for the heartache,
perseverance and untriumphant triumph of township life. Through snapshots
and memories of family and community, centred around the boy- and young
manhood of a single narrator, All The Places is a rare and compelling poetic
Bildungsroman, with the ambition and scope of a novel, paired with (and pared
down to) minimalist and clear-eyed verse.

Concurrently original and quintessentially South African, these poems mark

Khanyile out as a skilled stylist and storyteller – a frank and important new voice
in South African literature.

Musawenkosi Khanyile was born in 1991 and raised in

Nseleni. He holds a Masters in Clinical Psychology from the
University of Zululand, and a Masters in Creative Writing
from the University of the Western Cape. His first published
poems appeared in an uHlanga magazine released in 2014. He
currently lives in Cape Town. This is his first book.

9780620838719 | 58pp. | 2019 | uHlanga, South Africa | $14/£11

2
The Alkalinity of
Bottled Water
Makhosazana Xaba

Makhosazana Xaba, with several collections and

anthologies to her name, is at the forefront of a
poetry that embraces penetrating socio-political
insight with highly emotional responses to the
love and pain that our country provides in such
abundance.

Makhosazana Xaba is the author of two poetry collections:

these hands (2005) and, Tongues of their Mothers (2008). Her
poetry has been anthologized widely, translated into Italian,
Mandarin and Turkish and also available from the Cambridge
Poetry Archive. She is the editor of, Like the untouchable wind:
An anthology of poems (2016). Her collection of collection of fiction, Running &
other stories (2013), won the SALA Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award in 2014.
Her short story “Running” won the Deon Hofmeyr Prize for Creative Writing in
2005 and was anthologised in, 20 Best Short Stories of South Africa’s Democracy,
in 2014. She has co-edited three anthologies; Proudly Malawian: Life Stories from
lesbian and gender-nonconforming individuals (2016) and Queer Africa: New and
Collected Fiction (2013) which won the 26th Lambda Literary Award for the
fiction anthology category in 2014 and was translated in Spanish in the same
year. Xaba holds an MA in Writing (with distinction) from The University of the
Witwatersrand.

9780994708168 | 76pp. | 2019 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $16/£11

3
Ancestors and Other
Visitors
Selected Poetry & Drawings
D. Stevenson

Pursued through poetic pastures of faith, love,

and time by an Omuhimba muse who alternately
challenges and enchants him, D. Stevenson presents
Ancestors and Other Visitors, a poetry anthology
that is as sweepingly existential as it is personal and
as sagely simple as it is complex.

An immigrant, artist and spoken wordsmith ob-

serving the world through a traveler soul, Stevenson journeys through time and
literary style to pay homage to influence such as e.e. cummings, W.B. Yeats and
Robert Hayden in a wonderfully intimate selection of poems.

Set primarily in Windhoek, Namibia, Stevenson’s home of 37 years, Ancestors is at

once a musing on self, surroundings and the local artists who inflame his imagi-
nation: a young Namibian painter, a dance troupe that inspired ‘Arc magnificent’
and ‘Unseen’, with original ballet, and the assorted upcoming poets who fees his
passion and whose stage he shares. Offering up exposition as well as desperate,
imagined and curious conversations. Ancestors is a welcome and unprecedented
addition to the Namibian poetry landscape.

Don Stevenson was born in New York City, grew up in

western United States and embraced the Baha i Faith while
serving in Vietnam with the U.S. military. He met his wife
while living in Germany. With their two daughters, they
moved to Namibia in 1981, where shortly thereafter, their son
was born. Don is a poet, illustrator, copy editor, graphic designer, bonsai artist and
sometime actor, and lectured at the University of Namibia for 19 years.

9789991642444 | 92pp. col.illus | 2018 | University of Namibia Press | $20/£16

4
The Bavino Sermons
Lesego Rampolokeng

Originally published in 1999, The Bavino Sermons

includes such memorable poems as ‘Lines for
Vincent’, ‘Riding the victim train’, ‘To Gil Scott-
Heron’, ‘Crab attack’,‘Rap Ranting’ and ‘The Fela
Sermon’.

The dark Kafkaesque humour of Lesego Rampolokeng

is an arrow shot into the heart of the complacent,
those “wearing the victim label/ everyone a sufferer/
pretending there never was a biafra/ can’t see ethiopia
for myopia”. But his concern is less with an overtly
party-political struggle, than it is with a struggle against fascism in everyday life...
Rampolokeng’s work exists on many levels. He is a veritable Recording Angel of
a trans-historical, trans-geographical society wracked with contradictions, and
continuous instances of horrific, gratuitous violence.
- Paul Wessels, Cape Times

Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright,

filmmaker and writing teacher who rose to prominence in the
1980s, a turbulent period in South Africa’s history. He is the
author of several pioneering collections of poetry including
Talking Rain (1993), The Bavino Sermons (1999), Head on
Fire (2012) and A Half Century Thing (2015). He is also the author of three novels,
two plays, screenplays and has collaborated in performances and recording with
several musicians.

9781928476306 | 126pp. | 2019 | Deep South, South Africa | $16/£12

5
Beautiful Fire
Joyce Ash

“The inspired and well crafted poetry of Joyce Ash

is a feast of life deepened and intensified through
her poetic search for meaning. Here is a poet whose
every movement into language challenges us out of
our sentimental approaches to living. Her merciless
insights translate reality into what it used to be, taking
us to the long forgotten world where language, cultural
roots, womanhood, and nature itself are experienced
as vital parts of the republic of the self. Beautiful Fire is
a book that shows us what poetry can be, a book that
stays with you long after you have finished reading it.”
- Amir Or, author of Wings

“Beautiful Fire radiates intimacy, passion, and sensitivity. This poetry touches us to
our deepest core and awakens the warm emotions and humanity we can’t ignore.
Joyce Ash gathers images into a honeycomb that the reader tastes and keeps on
devouring its sweetness. The highly imagistic poems proffer an enduring message that
resonates with our private and public selves.”
- Tanure Ojaide, Poet

Dr. Joyce Ash is a poet, actress, creative writer and

Associate Professor of English at the University of Hartford,
Connecticut. Her first book of poetry, A Basket of Flaming
Ashes, was published to great acclaim. She has also contributed
to several international anthologies of poetry, including Dhaka
Anthology of World Poetry, Reflections: An Anthology of New Work by African
Women Poets, We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa and World
Poetry Almanac 2011. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Greek,
Hebrew, Turkish and Bengali (Bangla).

9781942876250 | 90pp | 2018 | Spears Media Press, Cameroon | $13/£9.99

6
Bluesology and
Bofelosophy
Poetry and Essays
Mphutlane wa Bofelo

The poems, stories and essays of Mphutlane wa

Bofelo operate within a framework of thinking
that is an amalgam of philosophies: that of black
consciousness, humanistic Islam and socialism. His voice is both lyrical and
satirical, expressing anger and tenderness even as his barbs are sharp and his
kisses tender. His beats are complex polyrhythms that roll on in incantatory style
or achieve mystical brevity.

Bofelo entered the world of sociopolitical and cultural activism in the early 1980s
through the black consciousness movement in Zamdela Township in Sasolburg.
He lives in Durban, where he has built up an audience as a performer of poetry,
a speaker and a facilitator. He has self-published two poetry collections and is
represented in journals, newspapers and on web sites.

Mphutlane wa Bofelo entered the world of sociopolitical

and cultural activism in the early 1980s through the black
consciousness movement in Zamdela Township in Sasolburg.
He lives in Durban, where he has built up an audience as a
performer of poetry, a speaker and a facilitator. He has self-
published two poetry collections and is represented in journals, newspapers and
on web sites.

9780981406886 | 156pp. | 2018 | Botsotso Publishing, South Africa | $22/£18

7
The Coroner’s Wife
Poems in Translation
Joan Hambidge

Joan Hambidge has published over 25 collections

of poetry. Her work uses the magnifying lense
of poetry to dissect, examine and recompose
the material of her own life and work, and in so
doing, explores ideas and issues central to our
understanding of language and meaning.

The poems selected for translation in this

compilation offer insights into her views across
a spectrum of four categories: city life; love and
family; ars poetica; and time and eternity. The Coroner’s Wife offers English
readers the unique opportunity to experience a prolific and renowned Afrikaans
poet in their own language. Translations have been sensively rendered by
wellknown poets, Charl JF Cilliers, Johann de Lange, Jo Nel and Douglas Reid
Skinner.

Joan Hambidge’s debut book of poetry, Hartskrif, was

published in 1985. Her second collection, Bitterlemoene,
published in 1986, was the recipient of the Eugène Marais
Prize. She was also awarded the Litera Prize for her
poem on Eugène Marais (which appeared in Lykdigte)
and the ATKV Poetry Prize for her collection, Visums by Verstek. In the
decades since receiving these awards, Hambidge has written prolifically and
produced over 25 poetry collections, the most recent being Indeks, (Human &
Rousseau, 2016). She was a lecturer and later a professor at the University of
the North. Since 1992, she has been a professor at the School of Literature
and Languages at the University of Cape Town. In 2016, she was also
appointed to the Council of the University of Stellenbosch. She is an active
reviewer, literary theorist and public intellectual, and has written extensively
on Postmodernism, deconstruction and gender. She has also published various
novels, including Die Judaskus (Perskor, 1988) and Kladboek (Protea, 2008).

9780639914121 | 90pp. | 2018 | Dryad Press, South Africa | $15/£12

8
Dance of the
Kangaroos
The Riot shall not be Televised
MD Mbutoh

Dance of the Kangaroos (The Riot shall not be

Televised) is a collection of 42 poems on the
socio-political and economic realities of a people
polarised by bitter colonial experiences. Through
the use of metaphor and other literary devices,
closely knitted by an apprehensive sense of a
first witness, the poems highlight experiences of
oppression, marginalization, social justice and
human rights abuse.

Dance of the Kangaroos takes the reader on a journey that unveils the realities and
challenges of postcolonial African society. It is one where the superior class have
taken up the colonial whip and induced their subordinates to re-stage a colonial
parody under indigénat, a policy used by the French in colonial Africa. Mbutoh
draws on words and expressions from his African background and his knowledge
of his people’s colonial experiences to make each poem unique.

“Mbutoh has an ear for music. The poems in Dance of the Kangaroos are not only
courageous, they are melodic, intense, ruminative, and adventurous. Every reader
can be assured that one reading of these beautifully written poems will not just be
enough.”
- Okwudili Nebeolisa, Nigerian Poet Laureate

MD Mbutoh is an award-winning poet from the North West

Region of Cameroon. His literary works have appeared in
journals, blogs, and newspapers across the world including
Refugee Republic (poetry collection) 2017, and Praxis, (2017)
a Nigerian-based literary magazine. His debut play, ‘Coastland
of Hope’ (2016) was commended by the BBC Radio Play in 2017. He was guest
writer in the Short Story Day Africa Flow Workshop in 2016 and 2017 respectively,
as well as guest writer for the Bakwa Magazine Creative Writing Workshop in 2016.

9781942876229 | 70pp | 2018 | Spears Media Press, Cameroon | $15/£11

9
Environmental
F(r)iction
The Illusion of Progress / The
Progress of Illusion
Bill F. Ndi

So much ink has already been spilled on the issues

of climate change. In this collection, Bill F. Ndi
blends environmental sciences with poetic art in a
bit to make the strange ordinary and the ordinary
strangely extraordinary. The poems challenge the
denialists in desperate need for some material to
chew on. The poems in this collection, written with both provocativeness and
compassion, are about the wondrous working of nature. This brilliant work of
poetic art—crafted with poignancy and beauty—uses a fixed form, for the most
part, as if to say Nature’s splendor should not be meddled with in the same way
man has and still does. This collection is an exquisite, an incredible as well as a
great and a rare gift from the plume of Bill F. Ndi.

Dr. Bill F. Ndi, poet, playwright, storyteller, critic, translator

& academic was born in Bamunka-Ndop, the North West
Region of Cameroon and educated at GBHS Bamenda &
Essos, the University of Yaoundé, Nigeria: ABSU, Paris:
ISIT, the Sorbonne, Paris VIII & UCP where he obtained his
doctorate degree in Languages, Literatures and Contemporary Civilizations. He
has held teaching positions at the Paris School of Languages, the University of the
Sunshine Coast at Sippy Downs, the University of Queensland, Brisbane, St Lucia
and Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He is presently a faculty with the
department of English and Foreign Languages at Tuskegee University, Alabama,
USA.

9789956550517 | 116pp. | 2018 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $16/£12

10
Everything is a
Deathly Flower
Maneo Mohale

dear reader,
are you still there?
take a second, now.
breathe //
with me.

In one of the most anticipated debut collections of

recent years, Maneo Mohale reckons boldly with
the experience of – and the reconstruction of a life after – a sexual assault.

Mohale’s unapologetic and disarming voice carries through a budding and

blooming garden of poetics, rooted in a contemporary southern African
tradition, but springing forth in queer and radical new directions. Indeed, this
is a work encompassing the full, often contradictory, and seldom complete
process of healing: where relations must be chosen as well as made; where time
becomes non-linear and language insufficient; where nothing is what it seems,
yet everything is what it is.

Maneo Mohale was born in 1992 in Benoni. Her work has

appeared in Jalada, Prufrock, the New York Times, the Mail &
Guardian, spectrum. za, and others. She is a 2016 Bitch Media
Global Feminism Fellow, and has been longlisted twice for
the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. After living
in Canada for five years, she now lives in Johannesburg, where she works as an
editor and writer.

9780639810829 | 68pp. | 2019 | uHlanga, South Africa | $15/£11

11
Feeling and Ugly
Danai Mupotsa

DANAI MUPOTSA was born in Harare, and has

lived in Botswana, the United States and South
Africa where she is now based. She describes herself
as a teacher and writer.

Feeling and Ugly was largely written between 2016

and 2018, although some of the poems were written
earlier or previously published in some form. The
collection gathers the various statuses and locations
she moves across, as daughter, mother, teacher,
scholar and writer. From these places, many of the poems try to approach
difficult feelings about what it means to “do politics” from an empathetic
complexity. “I’m raging, sometimes that makes me petty” is one such example.
The collection carries a set of standpoints, or willfulness about pedagogy, politics
and optimism. And while she carries an attachment to a non-reparative, or
negative affect across the collection, she closes in describing the work, or all of
her work, as love poems. This collection is a long love letter to those who are
wilful.

DANAI MUPOTSA was born in Harare, and has lived in

Botswana, the United States and South Africa where she is
now based.

9780639946511 | 86pp. | 2018 | Impepho Press, South Africa | $16/£13

12
Foundling’s Island
P.R. Anderson

P.R. Anderson’s second collection – which as an

unfinished manuscript shared the 2003 Sanlam
Literary Award – announced his arrival as a fresh
and significant voice in South African poetry.
Republished now for the first time in over a decade,
Foundling’s Island’s journey of coasts, creatures and
dreams is as tightly crafted and joyously readable
as it has ever been. A collection in which form is
created and meaning maintained with the lightest of
touches, to the greatest effect.

9780620812252 | 70pp. | 2018 | uHlanga, South Africa | $16/£12

In A Free State a music .

P.R. Anderson

In this quite extraordinary sequence of poems, P.R.

Anderson discombobulates and re-assembles the
image and idiom of the various nations, landscapes
and earthscapes of central South Africa. From first
peoples, to those who took and settled on their
ancestral lands, and to those for whom that land
would come ancestral, In a Free State encompasses
and compresses centuries of human drama into a
fleeting and temperamental poetic narrative. Yet
this is no drudge, nor is it a historical yarn. With
an easy mastery of form and metre, coupled with
swashbuckling metaphorical and -textual flourish, Anderson’s new “music” is a
bold and visionary work. A piece of South African poetry – and South African
storytelling – unlike any other

9780620812245 | 70pp. | 2018 | uHlanga, South Africa | $16/£12

P.R. Anderson, born in 1967, studied at the Universities

of Oxford and Cape Town; he currently lectures at the latter
in English Language and Literature. He was the winner of
the 2003 Sanlam Literary Award as well as the 2018 Thomas
Pringle Award for Poetry.

13
The Gushungo Way
Ndaba Sibanda

“I did not say I was a candidate to retire.”

- Robert Mugabe, at 92.

As citizens sank into an abyss of social anguish, a

lot migrated to South Africa, UK, USA and other
nations, and a once ‘hit song’ The Blair That I Know
Is a Toilet was flushed down too!
Of that song, one youth bawled, “I’m
suffering because myopic blunderers who can`t
even Man a mere Blair toilet were entrusted with
the managing of the nation. Stinking nonsense!”

Ndaba Sibanda, from Zimbabwe, has co-authored more

than thirty published books. He was a 2005 National Arts
Merit Awards (NAMA) nominee, compiled and edited
Its Time (2006), and Free Fall (2017), and the recipient of
a Starry Night ART School scholarship in 2015. He is the
author of Love O’clock, The Dead Must Be Sobbing and Football of Fools. His
work is featured in The New Shoots Anthology, The Van Gogh Anthology edited
by Catfish McDaris and Dr. Marc Pietrzykowski, Eternal Snow, A Worldwide
Anthology of One Hundred Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu
RD Sharma by Nirala Press and Seeing Beyond the Surface Volume II.

9789785621976 | 198pp. | 2019 | Malthouse Press, Nigeria | $16/£12

14
Herding South
Peter Omoko

In Herding South, Peter Omoko spotlights the

dispossessed and dystopian fate of minority groups
in Nigeria, and the fractured social equilibrium
that pervades the land, with its polarising and
destructive effect on the people’s psyche. Writing
essentially as a troubled witness, the poet navigates
through the horrifying pains and trauma of a
people, instigated by the ineptitude and narrow-
mindedness of their leadership. Omoko’s intention
in this collection – to speak home-truth to power
in order to reclaim the people’s humanity – is well
delineated in the sardonic and emotive metaphors used in the poetry and the
rhetorical force of its lines.

“Peter Omoko’s “poetry is passionate, highly imagistic and sensuous, and possesses a
special lyrical quality.”
- Tanure Ojaide, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

“In these poems, Peter Omoko adorns the gab of the griot to diagnose the socio-
political ailments that afflict his homeland.”
- Nduka Otiono, Carleton University, Ottawa

Peter E. Omoko (Ph.D) is a playwright/scholar who teaches African oral

literature, creative writing, African and European literatures at the Department of
English, Delta State College of Education, Mosogar Delta State. Omoko is also an
award-winning playwright. His published plays include Battles of Pleasure (2009),
Three Plays (an anthology of plays, 2010), Uloho (2013), Crude Nightmen (2015)
and Majestic Revolt (2016).

9789785657517 | 82pp. | 2019 | Malthouse Press, Nigeria | $16/£12

15
I Threw a Star in a
Wine Glass
Fethi Sassi

This careful selection of short poems, I Threw a Star

in a Wine Glass, originally written in Arabic and
translated into English can offer you a passport to
live for other planets never imagined. With love and
soft fragrance, works the poet Fethi Sassi to realize a
dream, that was until now, breathing in the depth of
his personality.

9780797493353 | 116pp. | 2018 | Mwanaka Media

and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $16/£12

Sky for a Foreign Bird

Poetry and Poetry Translations
Fethi Sassi

A Sky for a Foreign Bird emerges as pioneering work

of romance. This poet gives for his lovely readers a
graphic picture of a hug and kisses never to end and
never stopped!

9781779065131 | 54pp. | 2019 | Mwanaka Media

and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $16/£12

Fethi Sassi is a writer of prose poetry, short poems and

haiku; translator of all his poems into English. A member of
the Tunisian Writers’ Union; and the Literature club at the
cultural center of Sousse. His first book entitled A Seed of
Love was published in 2010. He has since published 3 books.
He translated a book by the Turkish poetess H. karahan, entitled poems to the
shadows in 2017 and his own third Arabic book into French is published in France
as Ciel pour un oiseau étranger.

16
Ilorin Ó Poetry of
Praise
Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah

Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah’s Ilorin ó is a unique

collection of praise poems in English, Yoruba, and
Hausa passionately celebrating and illuminating
the city of Ilorin’s wealth of culture, history, Islamic
heritage, and individual achievements. It is a work
that is solid in content, form, and techniques.
There are many quotable lines, a measure of poetic
strength. I cannot forget the line about the child
hearing Koranic recitation from the mother’s womb.
Also, the moral authority combined with oratory in a wise one who can be heard
by a dumb ruler! In addition to the rich Islamic heritage and the success of Ilorin
individuals in the areas of justice and bravery, the poet praises the city’s delicious
trademarked foods such as “Warankasi,” “Tuworesi,” and “Gbegiri.” Among the
best executed poems are “Onikepe Aduke Opo” and “Why the Sun Has Not
Diminished in Light.” Na’Allah has handled the praise poetry form dexterously,
and that means “at times even a critical appraisal of an item of praise.” The reader
comes out with a feeling of satisfaction for the poetic effulgence and knowing
Ilorin better in its multiple areas of distinction and especially for its multicultural,
Islamic, and tolerant character from an Ilorin-born and raised fine poet.

Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah, is the vice chancellor of Kwara

State University in Nigeria He received a BA in 1988 from
University of Ilorin, with a thesis “Dadakuada: the trends in the
development of Ilorin traditional oral poetry”, subsequently
published in African Notes., and in 1992 received a M.A.
Literature in English from the same university. In 1999, he received his PhD
in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada,
and was subsequently professor and chair of African Studies at Western Illinois
University. He is now the vice chancellor or Kwara State University in Nigeria.

9789785579864 | 86pp. | 2018 | Malthouse Press, Nigeria | $19/£15

17
KwaNobuhle
Overcast
Ayanda Billie

KwaNobuhle Overcast is a book of vivid obervations

of Billie’s community 20 years into South Africa’s
democracy. It describes an inhospitable and
sometimes callous KwaNobuhle, its spirit worn
away by the harsh toll of survival and political
betrayal. The poet remains rooted, borne up by
love, family, jazz music, and a stubborn belief in
humanity.

Ayanda Billie was born in 1975 in KwaNobuhle, Uitenhage,

and has lived there all his life. He works as a quality inspector
at Volkswagen SA in Uitenhage. He has published two poetry
collections, Avenues of my soul in English, and Umhlaba
Umanzi in isiXhosa. Billie is also a community arts activist,
jazz critic, and co-organiser of the Mandela Bay Book Fair.

9780994710437 | 62pp. | 2019 | Deep South, South Africa | $16/£12

18
Landscapes of Light
and Loss
Stephen Symons

Landscapes of Light and Loss is the follow-up to the

poet’s luminous debut poetry collection, Questions
for the Sea, which was shortlisted for the prestigious
Ingrid Jonker Prize and received an honourable
mention for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African
Poetry.

“The poems in this collection bear witness with the

crisp attention of a Robert Capa photograph. These
ecosystems, each with their own by-laws ... hold together such a curious, nearly
impossible balance in his new book.”
- David Keplinger, author of Another City

Stephen Symons was born in Cape Town in 1966. He

holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape
Town and is currently working on a PhD in African Studies,
focusing on the experiences of ex-conscripts of the South
African Defense Force under apartheid. Stephen currently
lives in Cape Town.

9780639914145 | 82pp. | 2018 | Dryad Press, South Africa| $16/£12

19
Les Pleurs du Mal
Nsah Mala

Que faire face à la stagnation de l’Afrique ?

Comment l’écrivain peut-il affronter les multiples
maux qui gangrènent le monde d’aujourd’hui ?
Dans ce recueil de poèmes, Nsah Mala adopte le
genre poétique pour illustrer son engagement social
et politique en évoquant des thématiques actuelles
de son pays natal le Cameroun, de l’Afrique, et du
monde entier. Ces thèmes sont, entre autres, la
corruption, la déchéance de l’État et du pouvoir, la
dérive de la démocratie, la protection de la nature,
la promotion de la jeunesse, la marginalisation socio-politique, les ténèbres, et la
liberté. Malgré l’ampleur des maux affrontés, Nsah Mala garde son optimisme et
démontre que la poésie peut servir de moyen pour corriger et améliorer la société
humaine et non-humaine. Faisant preuve de l’expérimentation et de l’innovation
poétique, ce recueil trace une cartographie intéressante suivant son auteur à
travers ses voyages infinis en Afrique, en Europe, et ailleurs. C’est aussi un moyen
d’entrer en conversation avec les auteurs et les cultures de l’Afrique et du monde.
Cette poésie organique et vitale, qui prend sa source dans l’humanité et la nature,
donne la voix à tous les sans-voix et devra ainsi occuper une place importante
dans toutes les bibliothèques du monde.

Nsah Mala is a multilingual Anglophone Cameroonian poet

and short story writer with 4 poetry books published. He is
currently doing his PhD studies.

9781942876465 | 84pp. | 2019 | Spears Media Press, Cameroon | $16/£12

20
A Letter to the
President
Mbizo Chirasha

His eagle eyes scan beyond the boundaries of his

native Zimbabwe to right the crookedness of men
with dubious ideals and reckless twists in lands
abroad. Caressing his Lenovo mistress upon a night,
he relives in recorded poesy, memories of victims of
corruption and the false memoirs of looters of the
land. A Letter to the President, is a collection of his
experimental poetry. Here is the man on a mission
and with a mission. Words are slings and rocks on
his quiver. Tireless and resilient; no ugliness is too ugly to stay below his radar.
His weapon of choice is his pen. Dipped in acid, as he says, no thug escapes the
roast of his laser beam that put them on the spot light.

Mbizo Chirasha is a recipient of the PEN Deutschland

Exiled Writer Grant (2017), Literary Arts Projects Curator,
Writer in Residence, Blog Publisher, Arts for Human
Rights/Peace Activism Catalyst, Social Media Publicist and
Internationally Anthologized Writer, 2017 and an African
Partner of the International Human Rights Arts Festival Exiled in Africa Program
in New York. He is a 2017 grantee of the EU- Horn of Africa Defend Human
Rights Defenders Protection Fund. Resident Curator of 100 Thousand Poets for
Peace-Zimbabwe, Originator of Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Movement. He has
published a collection of poetry, Good Morning President, and co-created another,
Whispering Woes of Ganges and Zembezi with Indian poet Sweta Vikram.

9780797495494 | 56pp. | 2019 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $14/£11

21
Liminal
Douglas Reid Skinner

Why do we keep anything?

All morning I hear the pages
rustling softly in the stacks.
Autumn comes to all leaves.

This seventh collection from one of South African

poetry’s under-appreciated masters is possibly
his best yet. Metatextual, meticulous and deeply
steeped in sentiment, Liminal is an exquisite and
at-times startling rumination on lives lived, loves loved and writings written.

Skinner’s technical mastery of his style and craft, honed over the decades,
only brightens the emotions that run through a mélange of travel poems,
remembrances, experiments and treatises on the nature of being, literature and
friendship. A testament not only to his exacting eye and appreciation of that
which has (and those who have) come before him, but also to an unending
adaptability and an unerring desire for growth.

Douglas Reid Skinner was born in Upington. He is the

author of six previous collections of poetry - Reassembling
World, The House in Pella District, The Unspoken, The Middle
Years, Blue Rivers and Heaven: New & Selected Poems - as
well as four books of translation, most recently The Secret
Ambition: Selected Poems of Valerio Magrelli, translated from the Italian with
Marco Fazzini. He directed The Carrefour Press from 1988 to 1992 and was editor
of New Contrast from 1990 to 1992. He is co-editor of Stanzas.

9780620762564 | 80pp. | 2018 | uHlanga, South Africa | $17/£12

22
Liquid Bones
Sarah Godsell

Liquid Bones takes poems as needle and thread,

weaving in small and big breaths, in magic and
in memory, tracing in stitches, stitching inside
stories, exploring the sky. Emotions are explored
in soft black and white tones sometimes, in defiant
blooming in other moments.

SARAH GODSELL was

born, and has grown up, in
Johannesburg, South Africa. She merges her work as educator,
historian, and poet, in trying to understand how we think
about narrative and power, how the past is alive in the present,
and how we are alive in each other. She released her first poetry collection, Seaweed
Sky, with Poetree Publications in 2016.

9780639946528 | 96pp. | 2018 | Impepho Press, South Africa | $16/£12

23
Milk Fever
Megan Ross

& the midwife then unhitches

oceans from the sky
& I am the blood
of my first blood’s promise

In an extraordinary debut, Megan Ross writes the

uneasy truths about unexpected motherhood and all
its emotional detritus. In deftly and experimentally
navigating the angst, joy and self-reckoning that
comes with the choices and misadventures of young
womanhood, this is a collection that brings together the evocative with the
provocative, and the feminist with the personal, in a bold and startling poetic
style. Hallucinatory, image-wet, and navigating the eternal tides of spirit and
body, Milk Fever is a chimeric dreamscape in which a woman reconfigures,
remembers and rebirths herself.

Megan Ross, born in 1989, is a writer and poet from East

London. She is the 2017 winner of the Brittle Paper Award
for Fiction and an Iceland Writers Retreat alum. She was a
runner-up for the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize and the
2017 National Arts Festival Short Sharp Stories Award. She
lives near the Indian Ocean with her son and partner. Milk Fever is her first book.

9780620792271 | 100pp. | 2018 | uHlanga, South Africa | $16/£12

24
The Mushroom
Summer of Skipper
Darling
Tony Voss

The debut collection from one of Southern Africa’s

most astute critics of poetry, born in 1935, is a
treasure. A collection that accomplishes that rare
thing in poetry: of being an immediate pleasure even
as it demands re-reading and slow contemplation.
With classical form and meter meeting modern
sensibility and local image, The Mushroom Summer of Skipper Darling fills a gaping
absence in South African letters, and will kickstart an appreciation anew of a
strong, steady and significant influence on this country’s literature.

“I have tried to write poetry ever since I can remember,” says the author, “with
varying degrees of success, having published poems intermittently over the years.
As an academic I found that the critical faculty sometimes interfered with the
creative in both the writing of my own poetry and the appreciation of others’. In
retirement, the critical and the creative seem to have become more cooperative.

“A poem can come from anywhere, but more often than not these days it will
spring out of, give admission to and offer a release from, memory. Quite often
a poem turns out to be my half of a conversation, and I can only hope that my
imagination admits the reader to a realm where words mean what they say.
While understanding may not come at once, a poet hopes to offer enough to
catch and hold the reader on first reading.”

Tony Voss was born in Swakopmund in 1935. He was

educated at St George’s Grammar School, Cape Town; Rhodes
University, Grahamstown; and the University of Washington,
Seattle. His interests were formed by his southern African
upbringing, his parents’ faith, and imagination - from songs
of the First World War and swing, to Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. “Like
most Southern Africans,” he says, “I grew up in a multilingual community and I
appreciate, enjoy and admire other languages, as they have been instrumental in
my developing a sense of the social answerability of any human activity.” He taught
English in universities until he retired from the service of the then University of
Natal in 1995. The Mushroom Summer of Skipper Darling is his first book.
9780620831277 | 78pp. | 2019 | uHlanga, South Africa | $14/£11

25
a naked bone
Mangaliso Buzani

In simple vocabulary a naked bone describes

complex states of beauty and suffering, often at
the borderline where life meets death. In their
dreamlike rhythms and images, the poems draw
strength from Xhosa culture, Christianity, and
elements of nature. They are love poems in the
widest sense, embracing the interface between daily
life and the spiritual, enacting joy and caring in the
face of deprivation and mourning.

Mangaliso Buzani grew up in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth,

and later trained as a jeweller in Tshwane. His first collection
Ndisabhala Imibongo (Imbizo, 2014) written in isiXhosa, won
the 2015 t. Buzani teaches poetry in English and isiXhosa in
the MA in Creative Writing programme at Rhodes University.

9780994710468 | 82pp. | 2019 | Deep South, South Africa | $16/£12

26
A Name That Is Mine
Mbuh Tennu Mbuh

A Name that is Mine is an enriching contribution

to Anglophone Cameroon literary aesthetics today;
a contribution which highlights the poetics of Self
that pervades Mbuh Tennu Mbuh’s writing. This
collection of poems is unique in its representation
of topical issues that animate life in transnational
and geopolitical spaces. Amongst other things, the
poems are teeming with postmodernist, postchristian,
and postcolonial rhetoric which culminate in
interrogating the “ideologies of a nameless creed” that
is couched in the Graeco-Roman foundations of “civilisation”. The reader will find
delight in accompanying the poet/post… subject through the struggle to “unstrap”
the Self from the subterfuge models of life designed to deprive him of the name that
is truly his—his identity. I daresay no reader will be disappointed by the jouissance
derived from Mbuh’s linguistic finesse that blends the formal, the colloquial, and the
local into exquisite poesy.”
- Awoh Peter Foinjong, Lecturer, HTTC, University of Bamenda

Mbuh Tennu Mbuh hails from Pinyin in the North West Region of Cameroon.
He obtained his B.A., Maitrise, and Doctorat de Troisieme Cycle in English
Literary Studies from the University of Yaoundé (I), and holds a PhD from the
University of Nottingham. He is a two-time laureate of the Bernard Fonlon
Society Literary Award, and a founding member of both the Yaoundé University
Poetry Club (YUPOC) and of the Anglophone Cameroon Writers Association
(ACWA). Having taught in America as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Resident, Mbuh
presently lectures in the Department of English Studies, University of Yaoundé I.

9789956550104 | 98pp. | 2019 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $16/£12

27
O Suburbia
John Eppel

‘... his poems have nothing to do do with white

nostalgia for the colonial period. On the contrary,
they circle round an attempt both to embrace a past
(after all, he has no other source of identity) and also
to wean himself from it.’
- Stephen Watson

‘Eppel is a poet with a compulsive gift for the telling

image …he has clung to a Southern African idiom
and concerns, even though expert in a “world
language.’
- Geoffrey Haresnape

“It is impossible here to really exemplify the full richness and variety of this
collection, which at times shows off Eppel at the height of his humane powers, at
other points descends unabashedly into bathos and brief whimsies. It is substantial,
at over 80 pages, and as welcome on the subcontinent as anything Eppel has ever
written.”
- Dan Wylie, professor of English at Rhodes University

John Eppel’s poetry collections include Spoils of War,

which won the Ingrid Jonker prize, Sonata for Matabeleland,
Selected Poems: 1965 – 1995, Songs My Country Taught Me, and
Landlocked: New and Selected Poems from Zimbabwe, which
was a winner in the International Poetry Workshop Prize,
Judged by Billy Collins. Furthermore he has collaborated with Philani Amadeus
Nyoni in a collection called Hewn From Rock, and with Togara Muzanenhamo in
a collection called Textures, which won the 2015 NOMA Award. He has published
three collections of poetry and short stories: The Caruso of Colleen Bawn, White
Man Crawling, and, in collaboration with the late Julius Chingono, Together. His
single collection of short stories is entitled White Man Walking.

9781779223456 | 82pp. | 2018 | Weaver Press, Zimbabwe | $16/£12

28
Oncoming Traffic
Maakomele R. Manaka

The traffic mainly reflects the silence in the author’s

personal conflicts, meaning, writing what he
cannot say, fusing different styles and tones from
the lyrical to the surreal to strip himself down to
the vulnerable marrow. As such, this collection of
poetry grapples with issues he has struggled with
on a daily basis: firstly, what it means to be man
when raised by a woman; secondly, his relationship
with himself as a man with a physical disability;
and lastly, as a black man dealing with the reality of
living in a dysfunctional society.

Maakomele R. Manaka is a Soweto born poet with a

strong artistic heritage. Mak, as he is widely known, has
published three collections of poetry If Only (self published,
2003. Edited by Don Mattera) and In Time (Geko,2009. Edited
by Andrew Miller) and Flowers Of A Broken Smile (Inksword,
2016); two of which have been translated into Italian and German. His writings
have appeared in literary journals and news papers globally and in South Africa.
He also recorded a dub-poetry album titled, Word Sound Power. Manaka has been
invited to perform his poetry at various literary festivals locally and abroad, from
Soweto to Spain, Cuba, Jamaica, Lesotho, Botswana, Germany, Holland, Italy,
Switzerland and at the inauguration of former president Mr. Thabo Mbeki; he
also performed for the late Mr. Nelson Mandela.

9780994708144 | 72pp. | 2018 | Botsotso Publishing, South Africa | $16/£12

29
Otherwise Occupied
Sally Ann Murray

In this serious, often playful, sometimes

outrageous volume, Murray draws inspiration from
contemporary women’s experimental poetics. The
collection recognises female writers’ equivocal
relation to forms of the linguistic avant-garde
such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and brings
embodiment and affective voicing back into the
provocative equation. Yet, this is not a simple return
to lyric intimacy. Murray inflects poetry’s familiar
inner speech with the sounds and shapes of found
materials and engaging cultural noise.

In Otherwise Occupied, the seamlessness of the beautiful, expressive poem

becomes otherwise under the innovative necessity of the page as an open field
of multiple (mis)takes and (mis)givings. Here, a poem is a space of enactment, a
process of thinking-writing and performative exploration: idea ↔ body, lyric ↔
language, innovative necessity ↔ enduring convention. And in the end: there is
no subject outside language.

Sally Ann Murray is Chair of the English Department at

Stellenbosch University. She has an MA (cum laude) and a
PhD from the University of Natal, Durban. Her novel, Small
Moving Parts (Kwela, 2009), won the 2013 UKZN Book Prize,
the 2010 M-Net Literary Award for Best Novel in English, and
the 2010 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for Best Publication Media 24. It was
also shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Prize (2010), and the Sunday
Times Fiction Prize (2010). She was the recipient of the 1991 Sanlam Award
for Literature (Poetry) and the 1989 Arthur Nortje/Vita Award for poetry. Her
poems have recently been published in poetry journals Aerodrome and Five Points,
and in The New Century of South African Poetry (Jonathan Ball, 2018). Otherwise
Occupied is her third poetry volume, her previous collections being open season
(HardPressd, 2006) and Shifting (Carrefour Press, 1992). She has also published
short fiction, most recently in the Short.Sharp.Stories competition anthologies
Incredible Journey (Mercury Books, 2015), Trade Secrets (Tattoo Press, 2017), and
Instant Exposure (National Arts Festival, 2018).

9780639914176 | 92pp. | 2019 | Dryad Press, South Africa | $16/£12

30
Où sont mes ailes ?
Where Are My Wings?
Soutcho Lydie Touré

“Don’t sit on your stool, watching life go by,”

insists Soutcho Lydie Touré. In this collection of
reflections written over a decade, she explores
insecurities and vulnerabilities, with which many a
reader will relate. She shares about loneliness and
feeling different and goes on to ponder everyday
life in “Politicking” and “VDN” – a memorable
highway in Dakar which pedestrians must cross
“under the mocking smile of the sun.” Touré draws on experiences and insights
from her life betwixt and between West Africa and North America. In her verses,
spiced with nature, color, joy, humor and fantasy, questions and answers compete
equally for the reader’s attention. A veritable source of confidence in the force of
life and love. Confidence that makes one grow wings.

Soutcho Lydie Touré, born in Bouake, in Cote d’Ivoire

in West Africa, manages information for various scholarship
programs in an international organization in Washington,
DC. Where Are My Wings? is her first collection of poetic
reflections.

9789956550791 | 76pp. | 2019 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $16/£12

31
Red Cotton
Vangile Gantsho

red cotton is an exploration of what it means to be

black, queer, and woman in modern-day South
Africa. gantsho interrogates being non-conformist
in both a traditional-cultural-religious upbringing
and a more liberal yet equally-oppressive urban
socialisation. This poetry novella questions what
women are taught about their bodies and the
feminine sexual space, while also addressing the mother-daughter relationship
as the first and most constant reference of womanhood. The collection moves
fluidly between the erotic, the uncomfortable and grotesque. What is painful and
what is beautiful? What is remembered and what is longed-for?

Vangile Gantsho is a South African-born a poet and a

healer. She is dedicated to creating and/or supporting spaces
which encourage (black feminine) healing. Most of the poems
in red cotton were written in 2016 as part of her MA thesis
from the University Currently Known as Rhodes, and 2017,
when she first accepted her spiritual calling.

9780639946504 | 70pp. | 2018 | Impepho Press, South Africa | $16/£12

32
Remnants Restante
Reste
Annette Snyckers

Her poems are as subtle and intimately telling as

the differences between the three languages in
which she writes and battles to live and dream.
These verses touch and tug at one another like
the Afrikaans of her childhood, the German of
her husband and the South African English of
her homeland. They agree to differ in all sorts of
nuanced ways.

“In a series of jewel-like images, poems like paintings, Annette Snyckers evokes the
real and imagined journeys of a lifetime. Beautifully conceptualised and crafted, the
poems in Remnants, Restante, Reste are easy to read and yet deep. When the end
comes (too soon) we don’t want to part company with the poet.”
- Finuala Dowling

“Annette Snyckers’ poetry attests to the rich inner world of a woman who has
sharpened her sensitivity against reality from a young age and has found escape
and safety in all the wild places of the world. Her poems, in three languages, leave
the reader feeling calm and vicariously nourished. Remnants Restante, Reste is a
whisper of solace.”
- Karin Schimke

“In this, her first volume of poetry Annette Snyckers both affirms and radically
questions with steely restraint, her place in the family of things and all the
conflicting things of family.”
- Danie Marais

Annette Snyckers is a visual artist and poet living in Cape

Town. She studied literature (English, French and German) at
the University of Pretoria and later Fine Art at the University
of South Africa. She was a high school teacher and translator
before dedicating herself to the visual arts. Her poems have
been published in literary magazines, online magazines and in several anthologies.
She writes in English, Afrikaans and German.

9781928215592 | 74pp. | 2018 | Modjaji Books, South Africa | $14/£11

33
Scrim
Haidee Kotze

The poems in Scrim are written with a taut

musicality enhanced by their arrangement on the
page. Precise in their language and feeling, they
remake the familiar in new and striking ways.
About Kotze’s 2014 collection The Reckless Sleeper,
Kelwyn Sole wrote “With inventive use of line and
page and an unusual, but telling, juxtaposition of
images, she achieves a poetry that is simultaneously
visceral and intellectual. Her poems are at once
both toughly gnarled and delicately gentle.”

Haidee Kotze (formerly Haidee Kruger) is the author

of Lush: Poems for Four Voices (Protea, 2007) and The Reckless
Sleeper (Modjaji, 2014). She is a researcher in linguistics,
focusing on language variation and change, and translation.

9780994710482 | 54pp. | 2019 | Deep South, South Africa | $16/£12

34
Season of Shadows
John Ngong Kum Ngong

“In this wide-ranging collection of forty-three poems,

John Ngong Kum Ngong undertakes a critical and
acerbic diagnosis of the socio-political situation in
postcolonial Africa through a deceptively simple,
aesthetically complex, and ideologically intriguing
style. The multi-facetted and interrelated motifs of
‘shadows’ and ‘seasons’, together with a plethora
of literary devices such as paradox, suspense,
metaphors, allusions, personification, irony, satire,
humour, and contrast, are the weapons through
which the poet drives home his message. The poems, in this collection, are not only
politically ‘correct’ but are also artistically profound.”
- Zuhmboshi Eric Nsuh, PhD. Lecturer, Literary Critic, and Political Analyst

John Ngong Kum Ngong was born in Esu, Menchum Division, North West
Region of Cameroon. He holds a Masters degree in African Literature and a
Certificate in Reading in a foreign Language from the University of Birmingham,
England. Winner of the 1st EduArt Bate Besong Award for Poetry in 2007 for
Walls of Agony, John Ngong Kum Ngong has equally published Battle for Survival
(play, 2006) and Chants of a Lunatic (poetry, 2007) all with Editions Clé. He is
presently Principal of Government Bilingual High School Etoug – Ebe, Yaoundé.

9789956550524 | 60pp. | 2018 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $16/£12

35
Secret Keeper
Kerry Hammerton

In poems that memorialise and celebrate both the

extraordinary and every day with unnerving clarity,
Kerry Hammerton traverses the landscapes of loss
and living, recalling the weight of past loves, new
life and imminent death. Hers is the poetics of
honesty: an un-filtered account of dying paired with
the burning urgency of youth and sex. Hammerton
fuses each tenebrous poem with the wryness of
its counterpart, balancing joy and mourning in
a harmony that echoes the human experience.
Unflinching and daring, tis a collection that sings.

“Secret Keeper, her third collection, testifies to the growing strength of Hammerton’s
poetic voice. These poems are brave and honest. Sharp as the truth. They look life
and death, ageing and loss, squarely in the face. And still smile.”
- Kobus Moolman

“Hammerton’s subtly playful journey in this collection [These are the Lies I told you]
is amusing, refreshing and extraordinarily entertaining.”
- The Star

Kerry Hammerton is a poet, writer and alternative health

practitioner. She is a graduate of The University of the
Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and The College of Integrated
Chinese Medicine (Reading, UK). Her poetry has been
published in South African literary journals such as Carapace,
New Contrast and New Coin, online at Litnet and Incwadi. She has also been a
contributor to The Empty Tin Readings (May 2010) and The Poetry Project. These
are the lies I told you is her first poetry tcollection.

9781928215578 | 68pp. | 2018 | Modjaji Books, South Africa | $13/£11

36
Shapes, Shades and
Faces
Moferefere Lekorotsoana

Like looking into a mirror, the poet surveys his life

and relationships asking probing questions, making
resolutions along the way.

“Moferefere bares his soul in this haunting collection.

This lyrical prose is about life, and the intersection
of tenderness and anguish at the heart of the human
condition.”
- PALESA MORUDI, Writer and MD of Cover2Cover Books

“Like looking into a mirror, the poet surveys his life and relationships asking probing
questions, making resolutions along the way – ‘be willing to hear from the seasons’
he writes, evoking ideas of looking to nature for wisdom, of the ever-changing
character of life and the promise of growth that the reflective life yields. His words
do not dance in vague mystery, rather they march with focus and clarity like
soldiers on a mission.”
- ATHOL WILLIAMS, Poet

“The collection explicitly and intensely reminds us that our spirits, feelings and
reasoning are rooted in experience both personal and collective, conveying it
truthfully and powerfully.”
SANDRA MUSHI, Poet

“In this, his language is spare, unembillished, devoid of the embroidery that tend
to cover up empty words. He adopts a language that is beguilingly uncluttered to
express complex truths.”
- MANDLA LANGA, Novelist

Moferefere Lekorotsoana has experience in policy

development stemming from his work in various Government
bodies and Non-Governmental Organisations. He has also
worked as a radio producer; head of communications in the
trade union movement; communications manager in the
Office of the Secretary-General of the African National Congress (ANC); and as
Content Specialist Advisor in the ANC’s Parliamentary Caucus.

9780639918716 | 206pp. | 2018 | African Perspectives, South Africa | $17/£13

37
Skeptical Erections
Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta

Skeptical Erections is a book of startling visual and

verbal imagination. In his poems Sapeta describes
the deception and self-loathing prevalent in the
people he encounters in his world, including
(or perhaps especially) himself. Despite their
distortions, however, the characters who come
alive in these poems are depicted with respect and
compassion.

Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta, born 1967, is a full time painter,

sculptor, poet, and art teacher, who lives in New Brighton,
Port Elizabeth. His work has been widely exhibited in South
Africa and overseas. Sapeta taught art for six years at Port
Elizabeth College, and now runs art classes in local schools. In
2016 he completed an MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University.

9780994710444 | 62pp. | 2019 | Deep South, South Africa | $16/£12

38
So At One With You
An Anthology of Modern Poetry
in Somali
Edited by W.N. Herbert & Said Jama Hussein

So At One With You is a groundbreaking anthology

of the last fifty years of Somali poetry, and marks
ten years of collaboration between Kayd Somali
Arts and Culture and the Poetry Translation Centre.
The anthology celebrates the primary medium
for public debate in this ‘nation of poets’, where
audiences in their hundreds gather to listen to an
intricate, virtuosic artform that speaks directly to them about the great issues of
their time.

As the title – taken from the work of Maxamed Ibraahin Warsame “Hadraawi” –
suggests, in Somali literature the poet is utterly at one with their listener sharing
values and aesthetics in an intimate manner that offers food for thought to
English-speaking writers, readers, and critics.

The present selection brings together eighteen key poets from across the
generations, and combines tender love poetry and pastoral idyll with scathing
attacks on corruption and hypocrisy, as well as social satire on life in the cities
of the Horn of Africa and across the globe. This is a world poetry, both in its
imaginative reach and in its ability to speak to the debates we all face in a time of
global crisis.

Said Jama Hussein is a well-known Somali scholar,

intensely devoted to the promotion of the Somali language
and culture. He is the author of Shufbeeland and Safar Aan
Jaho Lahayn; both are collections of short stories and literary
essays. His most recent work Ma Innaguun Baa! also published
by Ponte Invisibile, comprises of short stories and personal Memoirs.

9788888934631 | 207pp. | 2018 | Ponte Invisible (Redsea Cultural

Foundation), Somaliland | $20/£15

39
Under The Steel
Yoke
Jabulani Mzinyathi

In Under The Steel Yoke I hear the wailing of fellow

citizens as leadership subversion takes root. When
servants become masters- that is a subversion,
waves of despair threaten our people. I attempt
to reflect the resilience of fellow Zimbabweans as
we fight on for survival, hope refuses to die. The
ideals of the true liberators prick our collective
conscience. These poems are designed to provoke
debate about nation building and they are an assertion that there can never be
peace without justice. The poems are the voices heard on the streets, in pubs,
factories, churches, homes and wherever our people irk a living. The voices yearn
for a glorious future.

Jabulani Mzinyathi is a writer in general and a poet in

particular. In 1997 he was awarded the Scottish International
Open Poetry diploma for excellence. He has had several poems
published in several local and international anthologies. His
short stories, humour pieces and legal articles have been
published locally and internationally. The self styled poet, philosopher, prophet
loves the arts.

9780797484917 | 68pp. | 2018 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $15/£12

40
Surviving Loss
Busisiwe Mahlangu

Mahlangu’s debut collection, written between 2015

and 2018, is undoing a house of silence. Her writing
is too lived in to be naïve and somehow manages to
remain untainted by the cynicism of growing up.
If it is true that the artist is the child who survives,
then this is the book that journey spat out. Surviving
Loss is a gentle-urgent fight for breath and voice.

Busisiwe Mahlangu is a writer and poet from Mamelodi,

Pretoria. She is the winner of the Tshwane Speak Out Loud
Youth Poetry Competition (2016/2017) and founder of
Lwazilubanzi Project, an NPO aimed at using literature as a
tool for learning, resistance and healing. Her poetry is a raw
conversation around poverty, mental health, education, violence, healing and
staying alive.

9780639946535 | 74pp. | 2018 | Impepho Press, South Africa | $16/£12

41
An Unobtrusive Vice
Tony Ullyatt

An Unobtrusive Vice was shortlisted for the 2019

South African Literary Award.

“Crouched among the last surviving pieces of my

life’s wreck, I seek a chemistry, some wizard’s formula
which releases the wayward life from its grim history.”
– Tony Ullyatt, ‘Like Icarus’

Tony Ullyatt is that rare thing: a poet’s poet, but at

the same time utterly accessible. His poems are deliciously dense, his images rich
and sharp and his tone ironical, lightly seasoned with humour. Poetry itself is his
unobtrusive vice.” - Johann De Lange

Tony Ullyatt is an award-winning author, scriptwriter, playwright, literary critic,

poet and translator. He was born in Nottingham and educated in the United
Kingdom, India, Kenya and South Africa. From 1983 to 2003, he was professor
of English at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is
currently adjunct professor and part-time lecturer in the English department of
the University of Fort Hare in East London, South Africa. Since 1974, when his
first poems appeared, his work has been published locally and internationally. He
is the author of A Profusion of Choices: An Introduction to the Study of Poems (J.L.
Van Schaik, 1994). An Unobtrusive Vice is his debut poetry collection.

9780639914107 | 90pp. | 2017 | Dryad Press, South Africa | $16/£12

42
When Escape
Becomes the Only
Lover
Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

When Escape Becomes the only Lover is a

continuation and crystallization of issues dealt
with in A Portrait of Defiance. The poet deals
with a broad subject matter, love in all its forms,
spirituality; this spirituality is individual it is the
artist’s spiritual world. He deals with dreams, voice, word, numbers, poet’s
vocation, wars, language, etc… He is the prophet of his dreams, his world, his
future… There is strong experimentation and innovativeness in the writing,
in the text, in form, in style, in content matter, the writer is a discoverer, every
horizon is a life horizon. There is the dissecting of that space where art criticism
meets art mimesis, and this space is offered as the future of art criticism. The
storyteller refuses to die thus the collection proffers escape as the ultimate lover
who can help us deal with the insanities of our time.

Tendai. R. Mwanaka is a multi-disciplinary artist from

Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. His oeuvre of works touches on
non-fictions, essays, poetry, plays, fictions, music, sound
art, photography, drawings, paintings, video, collage, mixed
media, inter-genres and inter-disciplines. His work has been
published in over 300 journals, anthologies and magazines in over 27 countries.

9781779064929 | 64pp. | 2019 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $14/£11

43
White Masks
Ebi Yeibo

“This collection of poetry both reflects and creates

attitudes that we now regard as characteristic of
our age – the crisis of nationhood and the burden of
citizenship. Ebi Yeibo’s White Masks unambiguously
exposes the dystopian nightmares of a nation and
a people’s willing detachment from humanity.
While some poets of his generation are content with
dreaming of an ideal world, in White Masks, Yeibo,
through the resources of memory, experiments with
the idea of a better world.”
- Professor Ogaga Okuyade,
Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, Nigeria.

“…Ebi Yeibo’s White Masks is a collection inspired by hope. In whichever way it

is read, it cannot but invite a political and social argument. Highly recommended
to the discerning reader—to anyone who takes more than a passing interest in any
aspect of modern Nigerian poetry.”
- Professor Hyginus Ekwuazi, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

“…In theme, temper, and style, Yeibo reconfigures human experience in a

manner that makes it ethereal. In White Masks, Yeibo charts new frontiers of
human experience in culture, environment, spirituality, and history, while also
foregrounding the nuances that give his earlier poetry its distinctiveness.”
- Professor Sunday Awhefeada, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria

Ebi Yeibo is the author of Of Waters and the Wild (2017), The
Fourth Masquerade (2014), Shadows of the Setting Sun (2012),
The Forbidden Tongue (2007), A Song for Tomorrow (2003)
and Maiden Lines (1997). He was winner of the ANA/Maria
Ajima Prize for Literary Criticism (2018), ANA Poetry Prize
(2014) and the Isaac Boro Prize for Niger Delta Literature (2008). He was runner-
up, ANA Poetry Prize (2017 and 2005) and Pat Utomi Book Prize for African
Literature (2006); and was listed for the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature
(2017). Ebi Yeibo has also won the ANA Bayelsa State Poetry Prize (2008), ANA
Delta State Poetry Prize (2003 & 2004) and ANA Oyo
State Poetry Prize (2000)., Nigeria State Poetry Prize (2000)., Nigeria.

9789785669077 | 138pp. | 2019 | Malthouse Press, Nigeria | $16/£12

44
Words That Matter
Gerry Sikazwe

Words That Matter attempts to spark conversation

around social issues that are often neglected, either
for their lack of beauty or sheer rigidity. These issues
are mainly cultural and political. It further seeks to
community hope in its purest form, unfailing and
evermore willingly to rewrite situations brightly
however dark initially. Find thusly sarcasm and
humour, folly and wisdom, discord and harmony,
and death and life, all interwoven in revealing just
how sound existence can be (or should be henceforth). Above all, get lost and
find new paths in these verses!

Gerry Sikazwe, who is otherwise known as Gerald Sikazwe

in formal spaces, is a Zambian poet, literary blogger and
promoter. He has his works featured in print magazines,
Newspapers, anthologies and Online literary sites notable
being Nthanda Review, AfricanWriter.com, Dissident Voice,
Scarlet Leaf Review, The Global Zambian Magazine, Times of Zambia (Sunday
Edition), and Spillwords.com. He is also a founding editor of New Ink Review, a
Zambian based online literary journal which was founded to enhance coverage of
the Zambian literary scene, and also to contribute Zambian creative writings to
the wide world of literature. Currently he is a student of the University of Zambia
reading Adult Education, and actively involved in Creative writing and Spoken-
word poetry movements around Lusaka.

9781779063540 | 88pp. | 2019 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $16/£12

45
Zero Point Soldier
Moshumee Teena Dewoo

It took two years for this collection of poems to see

the light of day. Two years. Two whole years. But
two whole years of thinking, feeling and working
through and from one of the strangest and certainly
most torturous facts of life on Earth, and one of the
least explored themes in the world of the modern
woman of Africa, or my world, at least. This is the
fact of Death. But not the fact of the death of all.
Not the fact of the death of any. It is that of the
modern man, the man, of Africa.

“Pain, loss, and suffering are recipes for endless thoughts that would drive many
a man and many a woman into the spiral of depression. However, in spite of the
harsh reality of death and dying, Dewoo’s Zero Point Soldier captures and lauds,
with poetic terseness, a woman at her nadir who embraces courage to soldier on in
her endeavor to accept death, the brutal separator. Some of the poems echo Edgar
Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’. An interesting read.”
- Bill F. Ndi

Moshumee Teena Dewoo was born a child of Surinam in Mauritius, on a 23rd

December. She grew up in between a mountain and the beach, running the fields
and climbing trees, and her head in books, and learning of things that her parents
and grandparents thought best she knew. Her life would forever be influenced by
a combatant grandfather, a baptised grandmother, a teaching mother and a Hindu
father, all descendants of migrants constantly seeking to define themselves and the
world around them through words…

9789956550432 | 56pp. | 2019 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $16/£12

46
Zikr
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

To be resolute in faith – in God, in oneself – in times

of grief and disappointment. To unapologetically
assert one’s woman- and personhood in a society
that attempts to devalue both. To seek hidden parts
of yourself, both new and forgotten, through the
memories and words of other people.

In Zikr’s beguilingly measured and covertly powerful

poems, Saaleha Idrees Bamjee achieves these often
difficult tasks. In doing so, Bamjee introduces new idioms and understandings
of Muslim identity to South African poetry – yet not through manifesto, nor
outright polemic. This is a collection of fine metaphors, concrete turns of phrase,
and a refreshing specificity of image, place, and self.

Saaleha Idrees Bamjee, born in 1983, is a photographer

and writer based in Johannesburg. She has an MA in Creative
Writing from Rhodes University and is the winner of the 2014
Writivism Short Story Prize. Zikr is her first collection of
poems.

9780620803250 | 56pp. | 2018 | uHlanga, South Africa | $13/£11

47
Best “New” African
Poets 2018 Anthology
Edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka & Nsah Mala

Best “New” African Poets 2018 Anthology follows

volumes in 2017, 2016 and 2015. In this fourth
volume of these continent-wide anthologies of
African poetry featured is work from 154 African
poets from over 30 African countries and the African
Diasporas. There are poems in English, French,
Portuguese, Sepedi, Shona, Yoruba, and Asante Twi
languages. In 2018 there was a notable increase in the number of entries with
memorable novelties regarding poetic experimentation: some of the poets have
daringly sliced up words playing around with the spatial and structural patterns
of their texts on paper. This may be described as both textual and visual poetry.
Reading the poems becomes a journey with many paths, where the reader
walks according to poetic rhythms and the hesitating breaks of action verbs and
enjambments.

9781779063601 | 486pp. | 2019 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $32/£22

Best “New” African Poets 2017 Anthology

Edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka & Daniel da Purificação

9780797484900 | 614pp. | 2018 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $48/£34

Best “New” African Poets 2016 Anthology

Edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka & Daniel da Purificação

9789956764891 | 436pp. | 2017 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $35/£25

Best “New” African Poets 2015 Anthology

Edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka & Daniel da Purificação

9789956763481 | 386pp. | 2016 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $33/£29

48
Botsotso 16: Poetry,
Essays, Photographs,
Fiction, Reviews
Edited by Botsotso

The Botsotso literary journal started in 1996 as

a monthly 4 page insert in the New Nation, an
independent anti-apartheid South African weekly
and reached over 80,000 people at a time – largely
politisized black workers and youth – with a selection of poems, short stories and
short essays that reflected the deep changes taking place in the country at that
time. Since the closure of the New Nation in 1999, the journal has evolved into a
stand-alone compilation featuring the same mix of genres, and with the addition
of photo essays and reviews. The Botsotso editorial policy remains committed
to creating a mix of voices which highlight the diverse spectrum of South
African identities and languages, particularly those that are dedicated to radical
expression and examinations of South Africa’s complex society.

With over seventy poets represented, this is a bumper edition of the journal and
given the number of interesting and accomplished poems received (over the past
two years since publication of Botsotso 17), we believed it worthwhile to break
from tradition and dedicate this edition wholly to poetry.

9780994708120 | 186pp. | 2018 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $20/£15

Botsotso 20: Drama

9780994708151 | 234pp. | 2019 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $20/£15

Botsotso 19: Fiction

9780994708137 | 250pp. | 2018 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $20/£15

Botsotso 16: poetry, short fiction, essays, photographs and drawings

9780981420523 | 192pp. | 2012 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $25/£20

Botsotso 15: jozi spoken word special edition

9780981406848 | 266pp. | 2008 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $34/£24

Botsotso 14: Poetry, Essays, Photographs, Fiction, Reviews

9780994708175 | 266pp. | 2017 | Botsotso Publishing , South Africa | $34/£24
49
The Markas
An Anthology of Literary Works
on Boko Haram
Edited by Tanure Ojaide, Hyeladzira Balami,
Razinat T. Mohammed and Abubakar Othman

This anthology is an outcome of literary writers’

reaction to the Boko Haram insurgency in the
north-eastern part of Nigeria. Lives therein have
not only been extensively disrupted by the group’s
violent tactics and the mind-numbing levels of
physical destruction and thousands of deaths, but
also in the dislocation of millions of people, with most of them seeking refuge
in urban centres, especially Maiduguri, for safety. These refugees, classified as
Internally Displaced Persons and in camps guarded by Nigerian soldiers, have
received worldwide attention. Writers in the affected areas and elsewhere in
Nigeria have responded in their poetry, short stories, and non-fiction some of
which are collected here.

‘The Markas is the first anthology on the Boko Haram insurgency, which has
blighted northern Nigeria for the past 10 years, causing the death and dislocation
of millions... This anthology put together by insiders from Nigeria is definitely a
precious testimony on an often forgotten conflict.’
- Françoise Ugochukwu, Africa Book Link

9789785657500 | 20pp. | 2019 | Malthouse Press, Nigeria | $20/£15

50
Zimbolicious
An Anthology of Zimbabwean
Literature and Arts: Volume 3
Edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

Zimbolicious: An Anthology of Zimbabwean

Literature and Arts, Volume 3, contains 5 short
stories, 51 poems, 1 nonfiction piece and 3
drawings from Zimbabwean writers and artists.
Zimbabwe continues to tumble on its unshakable
political trajectory since Robert Mugabe was
removed as president via a military coup. Much of
the writing in this anthology addresses both the current political situation, and
the hope of the Zimbabweans for a free and fair election in 2018. Within the
pieces a lot of questions, anger, mistrust remain, alongside uncertainties around
the enigmatic political landscape of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean people.
Despite this the writers have a lot to celebrate and also touch on issues to do with
love, morality, spirituality, tradition, relationships, family, identity, individuality
and joy.

9780797496453 | 148pp. | 2018 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $19/£15

Zimbolicious: Poetry Anthology: Volume 2

9789956763702 | 146pp. | 2017 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | $19/£15

Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology: Volume 1

9780797496422 | 154pp. | 2018 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe | $19/£15

51
Poetry Publishers in Africa
- CAMEROON -

Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group, Bamenda

Spears Media Press, Bamenda

- GHANA -

Sub-Saharan Publishers, Accra

- KENYA -

East African Educational Publishers, Nairobi

- MOROCCO -

Editions du Sirocco, Casablanca

Senso Unico Editions, Mohammedia

- NAMIBIA -

University of Namibia Press, Windhoek

- NIGERIA -

African Heritage Press, Lagos

Bookbuilders: Editions Africa, Ibadan
Kraft Publications, Lagos
Malthouse Press Ltd., Lagos

- SOMALILAND -

Ponte Invisible, REDSEA Cultural Foundation

- SOUTH AFRICA -

African Perspectives, Johannesburg

Botsotso Publishing, Braamfontein
Deep South, Makhanda
Dryad Press, Cape Town
impepho press, Tshwane
Modjaji Books, Cape Town
uHanga Poetry Press, Cape Town

- TANZANIA -

Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Dar es Salaam

- UGANDA -

Fountain Publishers Ltd., Kampala

FEMRITE (Uganda Women Writers’ Association), Kampala

- ZIMBABWE -

amabooks, Bulawayo
Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd, Chitungwiza
Weaver Press Ltd, Harare

52