African, American
60 pages. 5″ x 7″. August, 2019. NDR. $12.
Design and layout by Laura Theobald.

The winner of our 8th Annual Chapbook Contest, Ayokunle Falomo’s African, American is a poetry chapbook that continually renegotiates the relationships between Nigeria and The United States, family and nationality, written and spoken language, domestic and public space, Blackness, racism and identity. With unfaltering tenderness and radical honesty, Falomo moves in that liminal space to expand our definition of what it means to “document.” Selah Saterstrom, the judge of this year’s contest, writes of African, American: “I am blown away by the energy Ayokunle Falomo transmutes into the line: the way he rebloods the meat of the breath-wrapped and delivered word. Falomo reminds us that the body is always a revelatory body; a place of reading. A place where shatter-conjunctions acquire legibility; where documents and certificates seam-up with lamentation-celebrations. I keep thinking of this work as a match that brings light and fire into this long, long night.” For a preview, check out this poem, which was published in our latest issue. 

Click buy now to order.