Stray
by Bernard Farai Matambo
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Pub Date Mar 01 2018 | Archive Date Mar 01 2018
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Description
Advance Praise
“Bernard Farai Matambo casts images that quiver with terror and desire. These images root within us as if we were the very landscape the poet renders spectral with the residue of human passions: cities of ruined arches and potshards underfoot, the human cost of conflict, populations bowed in reverence and fear. Matambo is an archer of lyric poetry. His words are ‘drawn out and taut, anxious as catapults.’”—Gregory Pardlo, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Digest
“Stray is a work of great sensual intelligence and evocative urgency, consistently intimate and political. With painstaking concentration and dazzling lyricism, Matambo dismembers the cult of pitiless masculine strength and paints a portrait of a ‘half man, half anger’ in the ‘empire of the zoo.’ Then he puts this ‘man with an ape inside him’ through the meat mincer of African and American histories. Matambo’s short prose poems are gulped down like bitter pills of remembrance and forgetting.”—Valzhyna Mort, author of Collected Body
“Bernard Farai Matambo debuts a collection that’s lush, yet urgent, determined to design a language that can feed the hunger for truth. The poems are filled with strays: people who have chosen the solitude and danger of separation—or had it thrust upon them. Though they gesture and reach toward some sense of belonging that blood, race, proximity, or shared experience might seem to guarantee, these wanderers are never more alone than when they are with each other. Follow Matambo’s poems as they stray from Zimbabwe to the U.S.A. and back, through landscapes haunted and illuminated by unforgettable images: ‘Once I caught a bough leaping into the air, a thicket of birds lifting off of it, dissolving among the stars.’”—Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781496205582 |
| PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 96 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Krystal Kavita J, Media/Journalist
In this evocative debut collection of poetry, Bernard Farai Matambo interrogates such notions as identity and belonging, as the complexity inherent in migration are insightfully deconstructed.
Joseph S, Reviewer
Stray by Bernard Farai Matambo is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Matambo, born and raised in Zimbabwe, is visiting assistant professor creative writing at Oberlin College. He received his BA from Oberlin and an MFA from Brown University, where his writing received both the Beth Lisa Feldman Award for Fiction and the Matthew Assatly Award.
Stray is prose formed poetry. The words bring complex images and feelings from youth through adulthood. Growing up in Zimbabwe, the poet has a strong connection to Christianity. It is a child's version but plays an important role in his youth. Although the book may be the same there is something fresh in the belief. It seems new compared to the established Western views. But, later he makes a discovery in his minister's Bible ("Holy Ghost"). Religion then drifts into adolescence ("Catechism"):
Remind me again, dear love, of that time when the world was as young as we were and I was lit bright with urges, light as the shroud Christ yielded when he gave up his tomb, sick of sleeping alone and dreading the eternity of it, when he sought himself some company. Of this no poetry shall come.
There is an inclusion of a poem of a man mentioned by Matambo's father. Ota Benga was a Congolese man who became a human zoo exhibit in St. Louis and the Bronx Zoo. There is much on the meaning of identity and freedom -- exile and return. In the poet's Preamble to the section Stray he writes:
We forgot the rooted scent of our dreams. And because we forgot the rooted scent of our dreams, we forgot they could flower. No, not anymore; no longer could everyone read the coming air for the rain.
Later works reflect on turmoil in Africa. The ghettos and the hardships are expressed in his poetry. In one poem the death of youth is reflected on and in another, leaders are mentioned by name. "Requiem :In the Case Regarding My Brother" is a powerful and moving poem of internal struggle.
The forward of this collection is provided by Kwame Dawes and provides extra insight into the poems and their meanings in proper context. A well-done collection of poetry that may not fit into the mold of traditional Western poetry, but is vividly written poetry, nonetheless.
Mary H, Educator
A prize-winning debut poetry collection, Stray will not disappoint. Also includes an informative foreward which provides meaningful context for the readers.
Librarian 299542
The African poet offers us a glimpse of what life was like for him growing up in Zimbabwe. We see religious themes, coming of age, and even social struggles. I was not aware of this poet before reading this book, but I will use some of his work in my world literature class.
