When We Only Have the Earth aims to cover interconnectivity across people, countries, and continents to show us how collective compassion for the world will quite literally save us. However, the execution of this collection didn’t work for me. While I understand the intent, I often found the movement through space and time to be unfocused, making it difficult to fully connect with the work. The poetry style itself wasn’t my favorite — many of the poems felt long and meandering, which diluted their impact. As a result, the themes in this didn’t resonate as strongly as they could have, leaving me uncertain about what to take away from them.

However, I found the second half of the collection more enjoyable, as it featured shorter, more direct poems that felt more immediate and engaging. The pictoem Afrokhoï Sapiens stood out to me — it was much more grounded and it was easy to follow the connectivity between these poems. My favorite poem overall was After All, which captured my attention in a way that much of the earlier work did not. It’s by no means a bad collection, but I think stylistically it will resonate more deeply with other readers than it did with me personally.

While I understand the motive was for WHEN WE ONLY HAVE THE EARTH to cover numerous geographic locations in a whirlwind manner, the manner in which it was done doesn’t necessarily keep a reader engaged. At most, I can only speak for myself. There was a dwindling and dawdling all throughout that underserved the spatial, and even temporal, trajectory of the work.

I was a fan of the pictoem “AFROKHOÏ SAPIENS” at the end of the collection. It was much more grounded which allows the reader to take it in much more than the earlier half. “A Short Ballad to Lull the Horizon” was of note and tender. :)

I can’t say that I’m well equipped to judge poetry, let alone translated scholarly works, but I was really excited to see this publication translated to English and featuring a French/ Djiboutian scholar. I certainly can give a layman’s perspective on the art, but hope that a more critical eye takes the time to review it. Thanks to the publisher for access to the ARC. I appreciated the translator’s note by Nancy Naomi Carlson at the beginning. It provided some much needed context and helped me look for a tempo to each poem and appreciate some of the word choices (for example, I’m assuming the use of “raining cats and dogs” is replacement term used for American audiences).
I think this would be best experienced read out loud so I hope that an audiobook version is on the horizon, if not already in the works. I liked the poems that had an obvious (for me at least) rhythm, like in A Short Ballad to Lull the Horizon. Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer series had songs or chants written that had a similar sort of cadence when written on the page. I’m wondering if there are similarities between Djibouti and Nigerian chants/ songs? Perhaps some additional information on the oral traditions of the region and how it would be experienced spoken vs. read would be a nice addition to the forward.