Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize
Tsitsi Ella Jaji's second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear.
This is what we have done since before the border between wild and free was pinned
The body politics of personal narratives embed into poems that collect the cycles of lives and languages that have shaped the wonders and worlds of Africa and America.
Jaji's artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and present. The tongues that capture and claim the losses, ironies, and a poet's human evolution. How deep does your language go back? The language of your childhood, the language of our aging? How deeply do we wear and hear our fore-tongues? How close do we sometimes forget they are? Mother Tongues is the gift, a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Maße
Höhe: 225 mm
Breite: 149 mm
Dicke: 8 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-4135-3 (9780810141353)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Tsitsi Ella Jaji is a poet and scholar from Zimbabwe. Associate professor of English at Duke University, she is the author of two books of poetry: Beating the Graves, awarded honorable mention for the 2015 Sillerman Prize, and Carnaval. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and in journals including Black Renaissance Noire, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, New Coin, and Jalada.
Mother Tongues
Table of Contents (i)
Dedication: Our lingering embrace iii
mother tongue (1)
1 On the Isle of Lesbos
Our Mother of Stone
Daughtering
And They Didn't Die
In Praise of the Great Cat
* lingua: corral
Five Bagatelles
Fingerings
flare
Symphony Dinner with Piano Soloist
Blue Note
Bandwagon
Cooking with Miles
Relaxing with Miles
* lingua: tongue-tied
Tell me something good
A Song at Dawn
Auxiliary
Prelude to a Kiss
First Guardian of Flight: The Angel of Time
Second Guardian of Flight: The Angel of Refinement
After Tonsure
* lingua: ladyfingers
Ethiopia Stretches Forth Her Hands
Manual for Initiation into the Zebra Sisterhood
Electioneered
Old News
After the Coup (or Not)
The Crystal River
Profile
How I Write
* lingua: good tast
Real Simple
Way Out West
Autumn Leaves
Marvin in Stereo/Right Ear
Marvin in Stereo/Left Ear
morning, 11.9.16
Burying Willie, Our Lion
Malick Sidibe's Camera Calls
* lingua: gorgon
Benin Bronze
Unaccompanied Minor
Children's Swings
Pond in Museum Garden
Ritual Object
The Body Counts
at war
Wildcat
* lingua: a quick tongue
The Graves Suite
Ballade: Thyroid Goes Rogue
3 Intermezzi for Unaccompanied Thyroid
Misterioso: Iodine 131 Meets the Royal Thyroid
Cadenza: Thyroid Rides Again
Koan of the Great Cat
* lingua: babble
We are the darker sister
Boy Lotus
Three Lessons on a Friday
Stumbling Block
Facing El Greco
When Thomas Finally Rolled Up, I Said
Infinitive
