Will Alexander: Refractive Africa

The African American & Diaspora Interest Group (Rutgers English) and Professor Carter Mathes' graduate seminar "Black Futures" will be hosting a reading and discussion of Will Alexander's recently published poetry collection, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten (https://www.ndbooks.com/book/refractive-africa/). Taken from New Directions publishing website: "“The poet is endemic with life itself.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé 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.