This book is an opportune warning that alienation, estrangement and intentional diminishment serve as a cancer upon those who disburse it. The outsider suffers by being alone; the insider suffers even more by being forever known as a hypocrite who perpetuates dystopia. It uses literature as a hothouse for poisonous potted plants, the workings of a mind in turmoil and the exploration of a society or societies that seems to derive pleasure from others' ruin. Fears, Doubts, and Joy of Not Belonging considers themes that are biblical in scope from different societies and historical epochs. It is a sobering spiritual enlightenment of a child's "silent treatment" in adult form. The text complements language engineers and social scientists who are on a quest or search for how the individual responds to pressure that is unexpected, ill-conceived and in desperate need of alleviation. Not only does this particular type of cancer differ from the type a surgeon can treat, the stage at which this malady is diagnosed causes far more problems than if it were dealt with head on. Pursuing numerous examples of estrangement, this diverse text delves into a wide spectrum of human behavior while coming to the realization that these problems are universal and have been with us for a long, long time. The purpose of resistance, individuality and personal identity is to rise above these obstacles without losing hope, resilience or optimism.

This book is a timely humanistic touch to memory studies. It uses literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, and characters as the subjects of human experimentation and diagnostics. This book considers authors from different societies and historical periods. The book is a refreshing illumination on the functioning of human memory. It complements the work of neuroscientists who seek to rationalize the workings of the same. Drawing from various ideas on memory, this rich and authoritative volume results from wide-ranging endeavors centered on the common fact that tracking memory in literature provides an astounding vista of orientations covered in its separate chapters. The writers examined in the various chapters become mediums for unleashing memory and its reconfiguration into artistic images. The ten separate chapters investigate different aspects of memory in such memoric associations as power, music, resistance, trauma, and identity. It is therefore no surprise that the editors should consider this book as "a veritable menu for everything needed for an unforgettable memory banquet."

The poems in this collection are adequate, with great lines. The rhythm is stimulating to all the five senses thanks to the use of multiple images. A lot of imagery in Vestiges gives a picture of a war front after a ferocious battle. The objects, animals, and images in the poems disorient and lead the reader to focusing on putting flesh to the bones than just getting the juice of the poems... The rhythm more than anything else carries the reader through this chaotic tableau painted in Vestiges. In a way, this comes across as a substantiation of the poet's vision of our world and an explanation as to why he considers this collection as a skeleton; and precisely skeletons left by the ravages of war. Is the poet's world and ours a field of ruins and topsy-turvydom to which we are all blind? The answer is yours.

The fiery passion and epigrammatic terseness with which Loretta Burns re-enacts her experiences and observations as an African American woman in contemporary America reveal her as a poet of life who transcends the labels African American, feminist, and/or womanist. Her poetry captures moments and scenes of living that echo her impressions and intuitions of a world trapped between appearance and reality, illusion and disillusion, expectation and realization, the material and the spiritual. Through her deceptive simplicity of diction, she explores the nooks and crannies of her psyche as well as her society's. It is a poetry written from the depths of the heart that calls attention to the mystery and sacredness of the everyday. It therefore comes as no surprise that Loretta Burns and Bill F. Ndi, the Cameroonian-born poet with a fierce drive for global peace and the oneness of humanity, should collaborate on a collection of poems. With vibrancy and a sense of urgency, their lines evoke humanity's perpetual struggle for freedom and its search for meaning.

Bill F. Ndi, poet, playwright, storyteller, literary critic, translator, historian of ideas and mentalities and academic is household name in Anglophone Cameroonian poetry. He has held teaching positions in several universities in Australia, France, and elsewhere. He now teaches at Tuskegee University, Tuskegee Alabama, USA. He has authored numerous (poetry, drama, scholarly works on early Quakerism as well as translations of early Quaker writings) publications in both the English and French languages. "Epigrams is a compendium of sagacious aphorisms in which Bill F. Ndi has dared to stand on the shoulders of the Muses to see in his own mind's eye; to decipher the indicible. The poet's locus is the all-too-human foible but the bull's eye is the optical illusion engendered by the misreading of life's chessboard. He chides, lambastes and laughs under his sleeve, all in an effort to return to sanity a world gone berserk." Peter Wuteh Vakunta, Department of Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, USA

The poems presented in Mishaps are highly varied, impressively experimental, sensitive and reflective across an astonishingly broad range of experience, and deeply moving in the richness of their humanity. Through each of them, resonates Bills vision of poetry as a special annunciation and of the poet as seer, as spokesperson, recorder, analyst, adjudicator and above all, as the reminder to each of us of the best that is so easily lost to the deathly universe of habit and blunted perception, to both the deadening routines of daily life and domestic regimes and to the crueller hand of oppression, authoritarianism, and misused authority in all its forms, from the primitive imposition of will through brute power political gangsterism, corruption and state-orchestrated perjury, as he calls it in Sights Along Abakwa Ring Road, through to the often less identifiable and far more insidious regimes of international finance, World Bank, Black Debt, and the hidden swindlings of the international monetary system. A collection full of richness and diversity everyone should read in its entirety. Michael Meehan (Writer & Critic, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)

A literary monument erected by a poet for poets with a vision for poetry as a special annunciation and the poet as a seer, spokesperson, recorder, analyst, adjudicator and advocate with poetic vision and poetic understanding. Bill Ndi, the poet has the rare gift of slipping into the self and psyche of his society to empty the dark depths where the treasures of burden and sadness are hidden. He empties and exposes them to the world to see how even personal repression of feelings by far outweighs those imposed throughout History by tyrants. It is above all, his greatest task of filling these depths with the joys and expectations of the society. This objective stance by the poet places him above the fanatic whose subjectivity pushes the world adrift and makes of the poet a universal man of peace.

A play set on a mythical hill, Ngoa and centred around Ngwa, the protagonist. Both mythic and contemporary, challenging and innovative full of accerbic social criticism, wisdom and political meaning, the culminating point in this play is when the protagonist is cast out of the scene and the Narrator alone on stage wonders and wishes the audience told him whether or not to "continue crying for the village, sadly or joyfully." A turn which, in this captivating play, marks an arresting moment recalling the works of Strindberg in terms of character interaction, entrances and exits as well as the works of Ibsen in terms of its philosophy.

In K'cracy, Trees in the Storm and Other Poems, Bill Ndi vociferously bemoans the fate of a world in which the good and the evil are intimate bedfellows; a world wherein miscreants proceed with nauseating impunity to trample on innocence. The poet, a widely traveled scholar in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, currently resides in Australia where he is hailed as an Ambassador of the Peace. Informed by his experience as a child of the world - being at home away from home and thinking of home, Bill Ndi serves the reader with a delicious platter of poetic maze which to him is synonymous to the political maze he has known around the world.