Description
Book SynopsisSouth Africa is a complicated, contradictory, and haunted place. Len Verwey captures the trajectory of life in such a place, dealing with childhood, war, marriage, divorce, and death. He explores the challenges posed by place and history, shared identities, deep embeddedness in the continent, and the legacies of violence and exclusion, as well as beauty.
Trade Review“Contemplative and lyrical. . . . ‘When I cannot find you / I give your name to everything.’ Such poems employ the periphery as an active, sometimes disquieting space from which to imagine. Such poems disarm me into sorrow, into hope.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of
The Black Maria and
Kingdom Animalia “Poems in this book plunge you, without warning, from a mattress on the floor, a village bus stop, or a fishermen’s boat into the depth of human aloneness. . . . Len Verwey writes: ‘You need to breathe / in stone, breathe out a flower.’ He accomplishes this mission in his book: breathing in history and landscape, he breathes out powerful, fervent lyricism.”—Valzhyna Mort, author of
Collected Body and
Factory of Tears: A Lannan Literary SelectionTable of ContentsCoast
My Mother Speaks
Fishing Boy
Fathers to Sons
Bitter Boys
El Bandito de los Nadas
The Quarry
Old Joke
The Bills
The Real Evidence
Campaign
Experts
The Stowaway
Our Leader Speaks
Elsewhere
Leaving
Confession of the Stable Hand
I Flew Secretly
Maputo
An Unchained Dog for Each of You
See Them
A Thing of Theirs
Ecstasy Revolver
Sunnyside
Antarctica
1999
Mourning for Beginners
Self-Portrait as a Father
Stone
With the Music Teacher
Rehearsal Notes
Jonah
In a Language That You Know
Doctor
Simple
Acknowledgments
Notes
