Head on Fire

If one measure of a poet is the range of what he absorbs, Lesego Rampolokeng takes on religion, war, street violence, global economics, obscenity, history, wordplay, sexual perversion, and, not least, his own contradictions. If he spatters the reader with blood and body fluids, it is not to shock or repel but to "engage with my world in all its manifestations... I want to see all the spluttered blood and gore. So I'm attempting to embrace its beauty. Hopefully."

Few South African writers are as prepared to engage with the fact that we are all, collectively and individually, the authors of our own chaos. "It is necessary for us to strip right down to the bone and see exactly how ugly we are as a people." Or more aphoristicallly: Not the barbarian at the door but the savage at the core