Saltwater Demands A Psalm: Poems
Graywolf Press
ISBN13:
9781644452271
$15.62
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Tyehimba Jess. In Ghanas Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku Abimbolas rhapsodic debut, the intimacy of this practice yields an intricately layered poetics of time and body based in Black possibility, ancestry, and joy. While odes and praise songs celebrate rituals of self- and collective-careof durags, stank faces, and danceAbimbolas elegies imagine alternate lives and afterlives for those slain by police, returning to naming as a means of rebirth and reconnection following the lost understanding of time and space that accompanies Black death. Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbolspictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meaningsand rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberations struggles and triumphs. Abimbolas poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.
- | Author: Kweku Abimbola
- | Publisher: Graywolf Press
- | Publication Date: Apr 04, 2023
- | Number of Pages: 96 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback
- | ISBN-10: 1644452278
- | ISBN-13: 9781644452271
- Author:
- Kweku Abimbola
- Publisher:
- Graywolf Press
- Publication Date:
- Apr 04, 2023
- Number of pages:
- 96 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Paperback
- ISBN-10:
- 1644452278
- ISBN-13:
- 9781644452271