African Poets

"La prière nourrit notre âme! (Prayer nourishes our soul.)"

"Je partage l'idylle qu'adolescente ressent à ce jeune âge; les premières amours, les premières joies et les premières déceptions (I share the idyll that a teenager feels at this young age; the first loves, the first joys and the first disappointments.)"

"Le poète, c'est celui qui invente son monde et qui peint le monde de la manière dont il voudrait qu'il soit. ("The poet is someone one who invents his own world and who paints the world in the way he would like it to be.")"

"... lorsque je me retrouve face au public et que je déclame mes poèmes, j’aime que ça touche les âmes et que ça leur procure un certain plaisir. Je me sens très épanouie sur scène. (...when I find myself in front of the public and I recite my poems, I like that it touches souls and gives them a certain pleasure. Onstage, I feel very flourishing. )"

"Ses intrigues de grands déballages, sanctionnent, rectifient, enseignent, éduquent... En cela, Barbara AKPLOGAN mérite l’admiration de son lectorat. (Her plots of great revelations sanction, rectify, teach, educate... In this, Barbara AKPLOGAN deserves the admiration of her readership.)"

""I remember seeing the sky as it scrunched its face, filling its cheeks with smoke hurling rage at every mans' door"."

""Here is a line between mana and man / and nature / man-made / as all false boundaries are"."

""I studied in Botswana and in the classroom it was the reading of stories that drew me to language, not poetry specifically"."

""My clay begins elesewhere where Okavango pours into Boteti & re appears here to watch this other water from a distance"."

""One of the things I was afraid I would miss out on with a digital residency was the very local and human voice but thankfully through technology we can approximate some of what a conversation in person accomplishes"."

""Do not ask me what I good poem is, I only know one when I see or smell it, hear it coming, or sense it scrambling off the stage or page"."

""This process of refining is everything is the goal is to write a good (read necessary, urgent) poem"."

""When my chapbook, Mandible, got published I don't believe I thought about curation very much"."

"My sister works well at the daily chore of keeping everyone alive"