To download the first and second editions, click here and here, respectively.
Presenting the third edition of the KSR Monthly Gazelles.
This pre-order tenure is going to last for 9 days, counting from today 12 August, and the gazelles will be finally available to download on 20 August. Feel free to order as many copies as you want. To accompany the gazelles is a poetry podcast of ten poems which shall be released on 20 August, free-to-listen and to download on Anchor/Spotify and Soundcloud.
Click on the images to pre-order. Each gazelle costs only N769 or $1.
“Droplets” supposes graduality or what sometimes can be seen as insignificant, as the phrase suggests—“just a droplet of.” There is the sense of both scenarios in Ezeano’s gazelle quaintly titled “droplets.” In this suite of poems, she shows the signs of a voice inhabiting a space of liminality, a sharp voice that seems to hold back on the many grievances it wants to let out, but shooting shots just the same. There’s vulnerability here, there’s longing too, a feminine cry, and love.
Orahii reminds us of the occupation of love, especially when it makes its tent in our hearts, in our life, taking up every real estate in our body. There’s that teenage flair for the romantic here, of love undying, unyielding too, sometimes, and all its uncanny ways. The moon, once more, is invoked too: under its spell we fall in and out of love. This is a gazelle to steal poetic lines of love from.
If bildungsroman was poetry, Frank Njugi may just have attempted it with his gazelle Risto Za Maswara. He starts with the poem “Benthic,” tracing his childhood in a Kenyan town Naivasha, humid with the smell of lavender, “a loop that transforms into a benthic,” he says. His poetry is mostly narrative and locked in with memorable metaphors. Here is a journey that is not yet complete but weaving a human story still.
In a fast, ever-moving world, money has replaced all facets of our imagination, when not too long ago, many people lived without having to bother about this curse. How did we get here? Can we go back to a better time? Or are we trapped in it, no way out, as Badmus warns in this gazelle: “you rip out your heart, / break the sun’s spine / & blindfold the moon”? Or in these words: “Salvation is expensive / the cost of blood / thirty Shekels per pint / of betrayal”? Even more so, he looks at the pursuit for outrageous or quick wealth dipped in blood.
Dennis’s gazelle is a procession of elegies, one after another, as the title professes a litany of longing. There is so much the poet now longs for while mourning—a reclamation of what is lost but which sadly cannot be retrieved. As said by the poet Carl Terver, “to exist is to constantly chip away parts of ourselves that can never be regained.” Dennis asks, “how do i heal, how do i exorcise your name / from everything around me?” He writes: “i’m staring at your photograph for hours / praying your memory finally decomposes / but prayer is a lunatic’s weapon.” It is his mediation of grief through language that is most appealing, and whose appreciation we are left with after reading his poetry.
We look forward to a great year of poetry with you as you place your pre-orders and share the links to other lovers of poetry.
Konya Shamsrumi is an African poetry collective excited about all things poetry. The Gazelles Project, whose press release was published here and official Call for Submission here, was created to put money in our poets’ pockets while building a vibrant African poetry community by exploiting modern and digital-savvy means of appreciating, consuming and distributing poetry. We also wish to use it to build a database of African poetry lovers where we can bring you all the good news and books and publication about poetry continent-wide. Why not join our community? Make that pre-order and visit shamsrumi.org and digitial.shamsrumi.org for more.
For more information visit here.