Kunuar is a volume of fifty-two poems framed by the feminist and postcolonial sensibilities of the Portuguese author, Luísa Coelho. In a painful but playful manner she describes her re-discovery, in a post-colonial era, of Luanda, the capital of Angola, the country of her birth. Memory crafts a vivid dialogue between today and yesterday that sheds light on the remains of colonial Luanda s history. Kunuar, the title of both the book and the concluding poem, refers to the small spots on the street where secondhand clothes are sold to the large penniless population of Luanda. The image of a poor mother distressed because she cannot afford even castoff clothes becomes an icon of the poverty of a city and a country, but her pain is assuaged by the urine of her baby running down her back and warming her. This powerful image points to many others in the collection, in which the recurrent theme of love of mother and child is one of the few sources of hope in the midst of misery and grinding poverty in a post-colonial country that is the second producer of diamonds and petroleum in sub-Saharan Africa. Like this moving and beautiful image, Coelho s poetic writing offers in a very subtle way an enchanting testimony about the past as well as the current oppressive conditions of Luanda after four centuries of Portuguese colonial order, Angola s independence in 1975, followed by its intense civil war from 1975 to 2002.

Frances Driscoll grew up in New England. She is the author of two collections of poems- TALK TO ME and THE RAPE POEMS and is published widely in literary journals. Frances Driscoll s work is used by trauma therapists, social workers, sexual assault awareness trainings for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. National Guard. Her work is taught in a number of schools in a variety of disciplines, adapted for several stage productions, and is the subject of Justine Gieni s University of Regina English master s thesis, Hysterical (r)evoluton: The Creation of Embodied Language and Amy Griffiths University of Minnesota English Ph.D. dissertation, In a Shattered Language: a feminist poetics of trauma. You can hear Driscoll read some of The Rape Poems and Seaglass Picnic poems at Mark Ari s website Eat-Magazine.com.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.