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poetry

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Daouda Ndiyae’s poems give voice to an “African land swindled since dawn.” Written in Wolof and translated into English by the poet, the voice is muscular and strong even as it mourns the unbridled devastation of Senegal.

David Grundy’s poem is anchored to the moment of music, to the construction-site of song. In the stretch of harmony, among the bricks of strain and silence, at the horizon of the text, it wages a measure towards that which is without measure.

Algerian-French poet Habib Tengour reads from his work at the Almost Island Dialogues in August, 2024. The spare, careful poems speak of exile, borders, and love. The English versions are read by editor and translator Rahul Soni.

Pastoral loss, processual epic — Kashif Sharma-Patel’s three poems retrieve language from the point of decay, urging it to remember, to offer shelter, to promise escape.

The long lines and unbreaking rhythms of Iestyn Tyne’s work take us through an ordinary that slowly changes into the extraordinary, be it beauty or its very opposite. The poems are rendered into English from the Welsh (Cymraeg) by the poet.

Mani Rao’s short poems here are like sudden, flashing knives that cut. Almost anti-lyrical in their craft, they continue to move under the skin long after their brief saying is done.

Sam Weselowski’s long poem is a miniature work of landscape art, frenetic house tour, and a capacious moment of world-building with all the scaffolds still intact. Both a poem about infrastructure and a poem as infrastructure, it beckons us to explore a specific mansion—a space shaped by the legacy of slavery—that now slips beyond the echoes of ‘everyday labour’. 

In three linked prose poems, Sohini Basak braids together pipes, bricks, tree roots and crumbling rooms with the nuanced longings and limitations of the human heart. The prose is trembling and vulnerable, yet has the strength of iron and the damp smell of soil, the unheard sound of aloneness.