Staff Pick
There's really nothing on this earth quite like a Will Alexander poetry collection. Channeling an oracular, surrealistic mode, his poetry invites something like a close encounter with the numinous, even as it simmers with friction against the muscle and guts of life's relentless materiality. In this mesmeric collection, three long poems stunningly negotiate a difficult physics of time, space, and memory, transporting readers through African history and its postcolonial legacies of creative survival and revolutionary power. Recommended By Alexa W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"The poet is endemic with life itself," Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. "This being the ballet of the forgotten," he writes as diasporic witness, "of refracted boundary points as venom." The volume's opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo — two writers whose luminous art suffered "colonial wrath through refraction." A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as "charged aural colony" and "primal interconnection," a "subliminal psychic force" with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander's improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance — incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.
Review
"Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines. Here, three long poems evoke colonial Africa." — Greg Cowles, The New York Times
Review
"Compelling and visionary." — New York Journal of Books
Review
"Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation." — The Guardian
About the Author
A poet, aphorist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist Will Alexander is a native of Los Angeles. The author of nearly thirty books, his honors include a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He is currently the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California.