In a Language That You Know

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Pub Date Oct 01 2017 | Archive Date Oct 31 2017

Description

South Africa is a complicated, contradictory, and haunted place. Len Verwey captures the trajectory of life in such a place, dealing with childhood, war, marriage, divorce, and death. He explores the challenges posed by place and history, shared identities, deep embeddedness in the continent, and the legacies of violence and exclusion, as well as beauty. 

Verwey offers poems that speak of uncertainty, ask questions, and challenge simplistic and scapegoating narratives that become so tempting when living in a society undergoing intense social and economic pressure. Dealing less with factual or political explanations of war and more with the compulsion of war, in particular, “maleness” and violence, Verwey pulls the reader into another world, opening eyes to the “crisis of men,” the violence against women, children, and the foreign in a country where conflicts are again escalating. In a Language That You Know strives to understand the complexity of one of the most unequal, violent, yet most vibrant societies in the world.

 

South Africa is a complicated, contradictory, and haunted place. Len Verwey captures the trajectory of life in such a place, dealing with childhood, war, marriage, divorce, and death. He explores the...


Advance Praise

“Contemplative and lyrical. . . . ‘When I cannot find you / I give your name to everything.’ Such poems employ the periphery as an active, sometimes disquieting space from which to imagine. Such poems disarm me into sorrow, into hope.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria and Kingdom Animalia


“Poems in this book plunge you, without warning, from a mattress on the floor, a village bus stop, or a fishermen’s boat into the depth of human aloneness. . . . Len Verwey writes: ‘You need to breathe / in stone, breathe out a flower.’ He accomplishes this mission in his book: breathing in history and landscape, he breathes out powerful, fervent lyricism.”—Valzhyna Mort, author of Collected Body and Factory of Tears: A Lannan Literary Selection

“Contemplative and lyrical. . . . ‘When I cannot find you / I give your name to everything.’ Such poems employ the periphery as an active, sometimes disquieting space from which to imagine. Such...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780803290983
PRICE $15.95 (USD)
PAGES 72

Average rating from 4 members


Featured Reviews

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A beautiful collection of poetry. There is a lot to love in these pages.

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I teach a world literature class and we are currently reading postcolonial authors. My students have been delving into the complexities of people who have been belittled and demeaned as they try to find a new identity after the oppressing culture is gone. There are poems in this book that will make an excellent addition to my curriculum. As with any collection, there are hits and there are misses, but overall I am grateful for the glimpse Verwey offers into his life in Mozambique and South Africa.

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