Madman at Kilifi

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Madman at Kilifi

Clifton Gachagua
Foreword by Kwame Dawes

African Poetry Book Series

78 pages

Paperback

March 2014

978-0-8032-4962-2

$14.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

March 2014

978-0-8032-5443-5

$14.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

March 2014

978-0-8032-5444-2

$14.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Clifton Gachagua’s collection Madman at Kilifi, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, concerns itself with the immediacy of cultures in flux, cybercommunication and the language of consumerism, polyglot politics and intrigue, sexual ambivalence and studied whimsy, and the mind of a sensitive, intelligent, and curious poet who stands in the midst of it all.

 

Gachagua’s is a world fully grounded in the postmodern Kenyan cultural cauldron, a world in which people speak with “satellite mouths,” with bodies that are “singing machines,” and in which the most we can do is “collide against each other.” Here light is graceful, and we glow like undiscovered galaxies and shifting matter. And here as well, we find new expression in a poetry that moves as we do.

 

Author Bio

Clifton Gachagua is a screenwriter, filmmaker, and translator based in Nairobi. His poetry has appeared in Saraba and Kwani? 06.

 

Praise

“The judges of the first Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets have agreed that, without a doubt, we are experiencing in this book the opening noises of a poet who will make a great deal of important noise in the future.”—from the foreword by Kwame Dawes


Table of Contents

The Cartographer of Water: A Foreword by Kwame Dawes
Charcoal on Canvas
A Slow Boat to China
Satellite
At the Confucius Centre
Promenade
The Lights in Zanzibar
Eternally Distracted
Ghostwriter: A Found Poem
Shakara
Memorial
The Nobel Prize for Medicine
On a Terrace Balcony in Abuja
Algorithm
Reality Television
September
Principles of Variations
Otto Gross
Central Park
Desertion
New House
The Anointing
I Could Smell Them
Lost Stones
Travel Guide
It’s Not the Same as When You Crush Paper Flowers
A Bronze God, or a Letter on Demand
Birds
Imitation Bodies
My Sisters Used to Put Me in Dresses
Unclaimed
Mountain
Strange Male
Merchant of Flesh
Playhouse Lane
Let Us Now Talk about Your Waist, Saying
Dancers
A Benzedrine Hallucination
Madman at Kilifi
Young
Reclaiming a Beloved City
The Ante-Chamber
Imagine Those Slender Cigarettes
Concerto of the Unconcerned
Galilee
A Genre of Isolation
Bride
Treason
Cucu Njeri
The Latrine of Giardia
The Bin
“Metrosexual”
Approaching Siaya

Awards

Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets

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