{"product_id":"refractive-africa-ballet-of-the-forgotten","title":"Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten","description":"Review\n\nWill Alexander's Refractive Africa is a diasporic invocation of world-historical and cosmological dimensions. Lumumba. Tutuola. Rabearivelo. Each long poem swelters, pulling a dense constellation of national heroes, ruptured worlds, hauntings, and sensory frequencies into its orbit. Through a glissade of luminous dexterity and precision, Alexander maps out a lexical cartography of Africas, real and imagined, lost and recovered. -- Momtaza Mehri\n\nSince the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines. Here, three long poems evoke colonial Africa ― New York Times\n\nWill Alexander's Refractive Africa crackles with the assurance of a worldview that eschews the studs of \"foreign domination'. Referencing African icons, ideologies and injuries, Alexander draws us into a feast of definition and redefinition, with a revelry in language, \"alive with ferocious embellishment\" -- Nii Ayikwei Parkes\n\nThere is likely no poetry more propulsive, visually kinetic, and intricately layered than that composed by Will Alexander... an imaginative realm that is entirely unlike any other, one in which we are immersed in sheer, coruscating energy -- Albert Mobilio ― Hyperallergic\n\nThis visionary act of \"transpersonal witness\" to a continent is an Afromodernist epic in the tradition of Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants... An incantation against \"Eurocentric stultification\", Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation ― Guardian\n\n...powerful and visionary...The collection sings from the page; it celebrates, it prophecises, and it revels in the great spirits of Africa's national heroes and literary giants. Alexander's writing is awash with innovation, ably straddling a world which is all too familiar, and a sparkling one of imagination... Refractive Africa is a bold and dazzling culmination of his contemporary thinking, and is an astonishing leap into the UK market ― The Skinny\n\nA powerful meditation on the colonial ravagings of the continent and the modern quest for resources that continues to tax its wilderness... An electrifying display of narrative power through chiselled poetic lines. ― Happy Mag\n\nAlexander's diegesis is one of chimerical fission and transformation... Everything is volatile and alchemical here ... Displaying great lexical elasticity and riverine agility, he choreographs a masterful 'ballet of the forgotten' ('The Congo'), revealing a lexical cartography of incorruptible reclamation ― Poetry Review\n\n\nProduct Description\n\nFINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY\nA Poetry Book Society Recommendation\n\nRefractive Africa is a set of three poems ruminating on diasporic witness, colonialism, invasion, and political resistance. This 'pas de trois' of poems begins paying homage to Amos Tutuola, innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author, and ends with a speech towards modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.\n\nThe collection turns around the long middle poem, using the geographical site of the Congo river as a lens for considering the pillaging and dislocation of societies through history, honing-in on the specific colonial and post-colonial histories of the area. He welds these to contemporary instances of ecological damage through mining for tin and cobalt.\n\nFierce, compelling, and full of astrological reckoning, this book is a 'savage enunciation':\n\n'this is the Congo\nvertiginous with derangement\nwith its foul \u0026amp; delimited hygiene\nwith its \"weaver bird nests\"\nwith its sprawling grasslands\nwith its \"ghostly voltage\" as flares from old oil rigs\n\nthus our intelligence forcibly blunted\nour thought stream injured as culpable integument\nwithin this compound negation\nterror persists\nsnaking its way through interior suppression'\n\nBook Description\n\nA career-defining collection from one of America's most significant poets, never before published in the UK.\n\nFrom the Back Cover\n\nRefractive Africa is a set of three poems rumina","brand":"smeikalbooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40271998746709,"sku":"9781783788309N","price":6.59,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/84bbaf82-97db-436b-824c-4bdbdeeaf7fa.jpg?v=1661876104","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/products\/refractive-africa-ballet-of-the-forgotten","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}