Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa's second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile's new and collected works spans almost fifty years. During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an "undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz." Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile's prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world-and did.

The poetry of Yaa De Villiers invites you watch her wrestle with the inverses and anti-climaxes of life and her enchanted embrace of its harmonies and ecstasies. Mphutlane wa Bofelo, author of The Heart’s Interpreter, Remembrance and Salutations, Bluesology and Bofelosophy. Yaa is vulnerable and insecure and figuring things out. Her collection is filled with grappling and contradiction, making her accessible. Touchable. Even her adventurous use of form, particularly in “What I found” and “Horse” reveal a womxn who lives inside, on and outside the colouring lines. The vacillation between lyrical and narrative poetry, and prose adds to the experience of living in Yaa’s skin. This collection is not all blood and skin, however. “Tongue” registers as a familiar charming post ’94 sitcom, and “Elegy for jazz” is as musical live – alongside bass and keys – as it is on page. At times her voice is out of tune and off beat, but always honest. Vangi Gantsho Undressing in Front of the Window.

What treats are served up in this new book of poems by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers! To read just the first line of the first poem is to be skeined into a tantalizing world where nothing is predictable. Like the best of poets, she makes language do her bidding, wresting new sense from familiar images and situations, surprising us and ambushing our expectation. In the title poem can be seen the range and subtlety that characterises her work – the clear-eyed honesty, the perceptiveness, the playfulness, the attention to nuance. The Everyday Wife sums up the boundaries and expanses of a relationship, the possibility of menace, even, in the midst of love. In one way or another, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers illuminates relationships of many kinds and many intensities – between lovers, children and parents, the politics of emotion shared and remembered and confronted, sustained across the distance of place or memory.