The Shallow Tales Review has published its 24th issue, dated January 2026, and it is a strong one. The issue centres on South African poet, healer, and impepho press co-founder vangile gantsho, whose work has never been easy to categorise, which is precisely the point. gantsho is the author of two poetry collections: red cotton (2018) and Undressing in Front of the Window (2015).

Her collection red cotton, an exploration of what it means to be black, queer, and woman in modern-day South Africa, was named City Press Top Poetry Read of 2018, and long-listed for the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2020 Award. She writes her name in lower case as what she has called “my small-girl revolution.”

The issue features two new poems by gantsho, a mango tree at the volta, & the stain and the fire and the girl who wears it, as well as a conversation with her, titled “poetry as re-membering,” which anchors the issue. The interview title alone tells you everything about gantsho’s orientation: poetry not as performance or product, but as an act of reconstitution.

The rest of the issue is filled out with six poems and two short fiction pieces. On the poetry side: Paul Chibuike Emenike brings “On Sundays We Go to Pray at an Abattoir”; Daniel Echezonachi offers “Refraction”; Jeremy Tiboth contributes “another letter sunrise won’t see”; Sosy Imafidon gives us “Sisyphus”; and Ridwan Fasasi closes the poetry section with two poems: Birdsongs and Self Portrait with Thornings and Hummingbirds. The fiction section carries two stories: “Funsani” by Mali Kambandu and “Falling, Again” by Donna Nyakapira. The range of voices here across southern, eastern, and western Africa is characteristic of what the Shallow Tales Review has been building toward since its founding: a genuinely pan-African literary space, rigorous in its curation and unafraid of difficulty.

Issue 24 is available now at theshallowtalesreview.com.ng.