Description
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.
About the Author
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.
Book Information
ISBN 9780810141353
Author Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 162g
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.
About the Author
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.
Book Information
ISBN 9780810141353
Author Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 162g
