Refractive Africa

Finalist for the Pulitzer PrizeWinner of the California Book Award in PoetryThree kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who transfigures thought into a weave of lexical magic (Philip Lamantia)The poet is endemic with life itself, Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. This being the ballet of the forgotten, he writes as diasporic witness, of refracted boundary points as venom. The volumes opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelotwo writers whose luminous art suffered colonial wrath through refraction. A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and bris vole of the book: the Congo as charged aural colony and primal interconnection, a subliminal psychic force with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexanders improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistanceincantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.