A book of two sequences, melded beautifully and seamlessly, both of which are the shape of the poet's consciousness and body in relation to space and place. Globetrotter is an immigrant's paean to the city of Toronto, while Hitler's Children is a poet's struggle with race, otherness and Germany in the spirit of witness, passion, humour, melancholy and understanding.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

In 2010, billions of naira were spent to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Nigeria's independence since 1960. More naira are to be spent in 2014 to commemorate the centenary marking the nation's birth in 1914 from an amalgamation of diverse group of peoples, languages, cultures and expectations. As the conscience of the nation, writers are calling for a deeper introspection. A hundred years after unification, the most populous African nation has oscillated from being great to being fickle, from colony to independence and dependency, from peace to war to ungraceful insecurity, from military dictatorship to civilian oppression and profligacy and much more of the many contradictions of a complex national polity. In this special collection Poems for a Century: An Anthology on Nigeria, poets from different backgrounds, generations and persuasions explore what it means to be a citizen of this unique African country. Shifting from despair to hope, lamentation to happiness, condemnation to adoration and every gamut of sensibilities imaginable, the contributors reiterate the notion of engagement and the power of the written word to push for social change in their beloved nation. In fifty poems, Nigeria becomes the muse not just to raise questions about its past experiences and present contexts, but also to posit aspirations for a better nation.

A startling debut volume, the latest in Chris Abani's Black Goat Poetry Series.

From the National Book Award-nominated author of Dreaming in Cuban, “breathtakingly beautiful” poems about her troubled, self-destructive brother (The Austin Chronicle). “[A] brave and moving tribute to a brother gone astray; with skill, unflinching honesty, and redemptive compassion, Cristina García tracks his marvelous, complex, and errant life…These poems are the beautiful, painful, astonishing result of a journey to hell and back in search of the brother she loves. With this first book of poems, García, one of our best novelists and storytellers, proves herself to be a talented poet as well.”—Julia Alvarez, author of Saving the World “Garcia’s spare language lucidly invokes the brother’s insistence on remaining a wreck and the speaker’s helplessness to stop him.”—The Adirondack Review

Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English is a theoretical and analytical survey of the poetry that emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s. Hurt into poetry, the poets collectively raise aesthetics of resistance that dramatises the nationalist imagination bridging the gap between poetry and politics in Nigeria. The emerging generation of poetic voices raises an outcry against the repressive military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. Ingrained in the tradition of protest literature in Africa, the third-generation poetry is presented here as part of the cultural struggles that unseat military despotism and envisage a democratic society. Not only does Egya place emphasis on the poetry's interaction with the culture and history of military oppression in Nigeria − an interaction that sees the poetry not only feeding from the history but also feeding it; he also contextualises the generational consciousness of these poets. Scholars of Nigerian literature, African literature, and researchers interested in world literatures will welcome Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English as an invaluable contribution to indigenous knowledge, critical studies in Africa, and the rehabilitation and production of an African aesthetic.