The poems in Tsitsi Ella Jaji's Beating the Graves meditate on the meaning of living in diaspora, an experience increasingly common among contemporary Zimbabweans. Vivid evocations of the landscape of Zimbabwe filter critiques of contemporary political conditions and ecological challenges, veiled in the multiple meanings of poetic metaphor. Many poems explore the genre of praise poetry, which in Shona culture is a form of social currency for greeting elders and peers with a recitation of the characteristics of one's clan. Others reflect on how diasporic life shapes family relations. The praise songs in this volume pay particular homage to the powerful women and gender-queer ancestors of the poet's lineage and thought. Honoring influences ranging from Caribbean literature to classical music and engaging metaphors from rural Zimbabwe to the post-steel economy of Youngstown, Ohio, Jaji articulates her own ars poetica. These words revel in the utter ordinariness of living globally, of writing in the presence of all the languages of the world, at home everywhere, and never at rest.

Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize Tsitsi Ella Jaji's second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear. This is what we have done since before the border between wild and free was pinned The body politics of personal narratives embed into poems that collect the cycles of lives and languages that have shaped the wonders and worlds of Africa and America. Jaji's artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and present. The tongues that capture and claim the losses, ironies, and a poet's human evolution. How deep does your language go back? The language of your childhood, the language of our aging? How deeply do we wear and hear our fore-tongues? How close do we sometimes forget they are? Mother Tongues is the gift, a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.

Africa In Stereo examines the role that African American music has played in the pan-Africanist imagination since the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jaji marshals a wide array of critical, archival, literary, visual, and sonic sources to craft an argument centered on the stereophonic echoes between three sites on the African continent emblematic of pan-Africanism (Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) and black musical cultures in the US (as well as few other places on the diasporic landscape). Rather than take a purely musical tack that traces the influence of African American music on musical repertoires from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Africa In Stereo beautifully shows how a US black popular musical genres inspired a host of writers and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene, John Akomfrah, Sol Plaatje, Leopold Senghor, K. Anyidoho, Charlotte Maxeke, Ken Bugul, as well as the glossy visual languages found in the early magazines Bingo (Senegal) and Zonk! (South Africa).