The January Children

Reviews / Votes

"A taut debut collection of heartfelt poems that speak to people who can claim multiple cultural identities, and whose identities reflect multiple geographies. The book is both personal and political, a love letter to Sudan and a memoriam for ghosts of happiness past."-Publishers Weekly

"Elhillo is a mesmerizing performer at slams and has garnered tens of thousands of views on YouTube, but her poems work equally well on the page. And they speak not only to people of color or African EmigrEs but to those of complicated heritage form anywhere in the world, strangers in strange lands, strangers even in their own lands, in their own skins."-Alex M. Frankel, Antioch Review
"In its best moments-and there are many-and across poems, one feels the plummet of alienation that comes from partial belonging, and therefore, from not really belonging at all. . . . Throughout the book, Elhillo matches the formal choices of individual poems with a compelling voice. In unpunctuated lines with extra internal spaces that mark pauses, drags, and absences, Elhillo's language tumbles and accumulates; it points and then emphatically points again; it betrays a relentless awareness of audience, and thereby reveals at least one psychological reality of betweenness. . . . And it is Elhillo's consistent reaching across gaps-like Whitman's soul '[c]easelessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them'-that is most moving of all. Despite the omnipresence of the Sudanese Diaspora, the movement of the book is from absence to presence . . . . The book, in the end, is shot through with a faith in human communion despite immense communal and individual loss."-David Thacker, The Rumpus

"The first sound of what will be a remarkable noise in African poetry. Safia Elhillo has already laid out in this collection a complex foundation for a rich and complex body of work. What is unmistakable is her authority as a poet-she writes with great control and economy, but also with a vulnerability that is deeply engaging. Above all, her poems are filled with delight-a quality of humor that is never trite but always honest and insightful."-from the foreword by Kwame Dawes "Safia Elhillo's triumph is not that she sings about novel love and heartbreak, but that she does so in an unforgettable voice."-Irene Mathieu, Muzzle "Safia Elhillo's The January Children offers the reader a galaxy of Sudanese voices engaging individual and collective memory in a manner that not only introduces readers to the nuances that animate that ancient land of layered diversity, which lends this collection a collage-like quality that is as sublime in its coherence as it is revelatory in its execution."-Post No Ills Magazine