New African Poetry: 15 Collections

by Submissions Editor

January 25, 2022

Our latest list is for poetry lovers looking to explore new writing. African writers have always been adept at using poetry as a unique window into the human experience. The writers featured here explore a broad range of subject matters and poetic styles. Their writing is beautiful and moving. While they gesture towards their literary ancestry, they are definitely carving out a path for themselves in the ways that they open up about intimate experiences and center feminist and queer experiences. The 15 collections on this list were published within the last two years.

Click the “Buy Link” and start reading.

Portrait of Colossus by Samatar Elmi

Portrait of Colossus by Samatar Elmi

40 pages

Portrait of Colossus is a searingly forthright debut that navigates parenting, masculinity, racism, and ambiguities of identity...Samatar seamlessly blends influences from Somali oral history, Ovidian tales and Homer's Odyssey into a poetics that makes Portrait of Colossus cathartic, musical, emotionally satisfying as well as erudite. (Flipped Eye/2021))

A Blood Condition

A Blood Condition

80 pages

This poetry collection tells a story of inheritance: the people, places, cultures, and memoires that form us...From London to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief and joy, and the painful ongoing process of letting go. (Chatto & Windus/2021)

The Actual by Inua Ellams

The Actual by Inua Ellams

84 pages

In 55 poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. Written on the author's phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. (Penned in the Margins/2020)

Virga

Virga

99 pages

Virga is the third book of poems by Zimbabwean poet Togara Muzanenhamo. Set in the twentieth century, Virga features historical events woven together by the weather...[T]he poems capture stories of a rapidly evolving century beneath an ancient, fragile sky. (Carcanet/2021)

Your Crib, My Qibla

Your Crib, My Qibla

108 pages

Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father’s pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living. This collection explores grief, the fleeting nature of healing, and the constant obsession of memory as a language to reach the dead. (U of Nebraska P/2021)

Where the Baedeker Leads

Where the Baedeker Leads

112 pages

Where the Baedeker Leads uncovers the many delicate layers that lie in the spaces between departures and arrivals, offering memories and stories. Whether it’s about journeys, personal transition, or changes in the seasons. (University of Toronto Press/2021)

A Fire in My Head: Poems for the Dawn by Ben Okri

A Fire in My Head: Poems for the Dawn by Ben Okri

122 pages

Ben Okri's new poetry collection addresses the urgency of contemporary global crises such as the pandemic, the refugee crisis, and race, while also reflecting on the history of humanity as a whole. (Apollo/2021)

The Rinehart Frames

The Rinehart Frames

126 pages

These poems juxtapose the character of Rinehart from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man with the film 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami, questioning the boundaries of diaspora and narrative through a tethering of voices and forms that infringe on monolithic categorizations of Blackness and what can be intersected with it. (U of Nebraska P/2021)

Hullo Bu-Bye Koko Come In

Hullo Bu-Bye Koko Come In

126 pages

The title of the book is inspired by a South African phrase made famous by the legendary musician Brenda Fassie in her 1992 song, Istraight lendaba...The book is divided into four chapters dealing with subjects related to history, the erasure of black women from the archive and more personal poems where Putuma resuscitates the stories of women in her lineage who have had an influence on her life. (Manyano Media/2021)

The River in the Belly

The River in the Belly

152 pages

Created originally as part of a multi-disciplinary work of poetry, music, video, and dance performed in Europe in 2019, The River in My Belly shows the Congo River as it runs in real life and through Mujila’s body and mind; he contemplates his native river and the decades of upheaval the Democratic Republic of Congo has gone through, in turns berating and serenading a homeland from exile in Austria. (Deep Vellum/2021)

No Roses From My Mouth by Stella Nyanzi

No Roses From My Mouth by Stella Nyanzi

196 pages

Stella Nyanzi was arrested on November 2, 2018 for posting a poem on Facebook that was said to cyber-harras the long-serving President of Uganda, Mr. Yoweri Museveni. She was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in jail...She wrote all the poems in this collection during her detention. (Ubuntu Reading Group/2020)

Mother Tongue by Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Mother Tongue by Tsitsi Ella Jaji

95 pages

Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear. How deep does your language go back? Jaji’s artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. (Northwestern UP/2019)

The Junta of Happenstance

The Junta of Happenstance

80 pages

Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba’s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease. This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet’s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. (University of Toronto Press/2021)

Teardrops on the Weser

Teardrops on the Weser

66 pages

Teardrops on the Weser navigates a geographical river that runs through northwestern Germany, but also an autobiographical river that's sourced in the Niger River Delta of Amatoritsero Ede's native Nigeria. (Griots Lounge/2021)

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono

134 pages

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiquing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics. (Wilfrid Laurier UP/2021)

Submissions Editor | author

COMMENTS ( 2 ) -

Aderibigbe muhydeen Bayo August 23, 2022 15:50

I need a copy of this book.

Aderibigbe muhydeen Bayo August 23, 2022 15:49

I need a copy of this book

LEAVE A COMMENT Cancel reply