When the Wanderers Come Home

`

When the Wanderers Come Home

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

African Poetry Book Series

126 pages

Paperback

November 2016

978-0-8032-8857-7

$15.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

November 2016

978-0-8032-9503-2

$15.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

November 2016

978-0-8032-9501-8

$15.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona Eze as “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century,” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction.
 
Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent struggling to recover.
 
When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman’s story about being an exile, a survivor, and an outsider in her own country; it is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent, creating more wanderers and world citizens.
 

Author Bio

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University–Altoona. She has four other books of poetry, including Where the Road Turns and Becoming Ebony, part of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments    
Book I. Coming Home
So I Stand Here    
What Took Us to War    
Erecting Stones: January 2013    
Looters of War 2011    
Coming Home: A Poem for MT    
Send Me Some Black Clothes    
I Need Two Bodies    
The Creation    
And You Tell Me This Is a Funeral?     
Loss    
If You Have Never Been Married    
Becoming Ghost    
The Killed Ones    
The Cities We Lost    
A City of Ghosts    
July Rain    
I Go Home    
Song for Mariam Makeba    
When Monrovia Rises    
This Is the Real Leaving    
Book II. Colliding Worlds
In My Dream    
Sometimes, I Close My Eyes    
Sandy: Love Song for the Hurricane Woman    
Tsunami: A Song for an Unknown Young Man    
For My Children, Growing Up in America    
You Wouldn’t Let Me Adopt My Dog: A Poem for Ade-Juah    
When I Grow Up    
The Inequality of Dogs    
Medellin from My Hotel Room Balcony    
Morocco, on the Way to London    
To Libya: February 2011    
Sometimes I Wonder    
The Deer on My Lawn    
Leaves Are Leaving Us Again    
Book III. World (Un)/Breakable
I Want to Be the Woman    
This Morning    
When I Was a Girl    
I’m Afraid of Emptiness    
Silence    
I Want Everything    
Finally, the Allergist    
I Dreamed    
On the Midnight Train    
First Class    
This Is Facebook    
A Room with a View    
Braiding Hair    
Losing Hair    
Hair    
2014, My Mamma Never Knew You    
 

Also of Interest