Description
Book SynopsisWritten as a tribute to family, place, and bodily awareness, Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s poems speak of love, war, violence, language, immigration, and exile. From a baby girl’s penchant for her parents’ keys to a warrior’s hunt for words, Wa Ngugi’s poems move back and forth between the personal and the political.
Trade Review“Mukoma’s energetic voice leaps out of poems that roll effortlessly and often joyously off the tongue. They are a wonderful adventure into his world of family and friendship, history, memory, and the imagination.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of
Mr. Loverman and
Hello Mum Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
I. To Give a Word a Name
Preface: Hunting Words with My Father
Ancestries of Land Mines
Keys
My Two Names
To Our Unborn Child Whom We Shall Name Nyambura
In Your Name
A Moment between Writing
An Orange
Pepto Bismol
Multiplicity and Skins
Safe House
II. Shadows and Light
Shadows and Light in Play
The Clouds Above
A Walk amongst Shadows with Sandra
Perfect Silence Is When Each Thing Sings Itself
Geysers and Hot Springs
Bifocals
New Frontiers: Wisconsin Winter
I. Excerpts from an Immigrant’s Diary
III. Whispers and Tendrils
First Meetings
First Date
Framing Your Picture
Framing a Second Picture
Guttural Love
Love and Distance
Leper’s Gold
Nostalgia I
Nostalgia II
A Poem Written in Silence
Last Frames
IV. Remembrances
A Poem for Arthur Nortje and Other Lost African Poets
Welcoming Mortality Home
My Grandfather’s Hands
Letter to My Artist Friend Who Died Young
Eight Months and Two Days Loading Trucks at UPS
Logotherapy
To My Archeologist
V. Gifts of Violence
Gifts of Violence
Faith
JailBirds
Fall
To the Driver Who Splashed Me with Rainwater
Dread Locks
Revolt
Prints of Genocide
I Swear I See Skulls Coming
Kenya: A Love Letter
This Is What I Know
Epilogue: On Reading the Poem I Should Have Written
