Description
The praise songs in this volume pay particular homage to the powerful women and gender-queer ancestors of the poet's lineage and thought. Honoring influences ranging from Caribbean literature to classical music and engaging metaphors from rural Zimbabwe to the post-steel economy of Youngstown, Ohio, Jaji articulates her own ars poetica. These words revel in the utter ordinariness of living globally, of writing in the presence of all the languages of the world, at home everywhere, and never at rest.
About the Author
Tsitsi Ella Jaji is an associate professor of African and African American studies at Duke University. She is the author of Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.
Reviews
"An outstanding offering. Forceful. Fresh. And not afraid. This offering shows Tsitsi Jaji to be an explorer of the textures of lived experience with admirable clarity of vision and expression, in short, a poet deep to the marrow of her sensibility."-Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa's poet laureate
"The gravel and gravitas of Beating the Graves lies in its ferociously polyglot density. Peep that diction, peeps! As this moving book reminds us in its deep listening to our noisy dead (diaspora), any border can be crossed by sound."-Christian Campbell, author of Running the Dusk
"Packed with a stunning, virtuosic range of occasion and disposition (praise, imprecation, prayer, play, to name only a few), Beating the Graves is an auspicious debut volume by a formidable poet-musician-scholar."-Nathaniel Mackey, author of Blue Fasa
Book Information
ISBN 9780803299603
Author Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Format Paperback
Page Count 114
Imprint University of Nebraska Press
Publisher University of Nebraska Press