In a whirlwind of local history, contemporary culture, domestic angst, and nostalgia, Thabo Jijana's debut collection of award-winning poems exhibits an emotional wisdom beyond the writer's years. Earthen and edgy, musical and minimal, Failing Maths and My Other Crimes is not solely a meditation on family and mortality, nor just a manifesto on the role of art in a young man's life: beyond all, this collection is a short masterclass in South African storytelling-in-verse. Thabo Jijana, born in 1988, was the 2011 recipient of the Anthony Sampson Foundation Award and the 2014 winner of the Sol Plaatje/European Union Poetry Award. In 2014, he published his first book, Nobody's Business, a memoir. Born and raised in eNgqushwa, Thabo currently lives in Port Elizabeth, where he works as a writer.

Failing Maths and My Other Crimes

Literature & Fiction

Jijana, Thabo

Poetry

uHlanga

Equal parts flippant and plaintive, Nick Mulgrew's first collection of poems is a three-part meditation on the ways in which people lose trust in each other, their communities, and themselves. Experimentally laced with monologue, anecdote and truism, these thirty-two self-aware, diary-esque poems languish in the small sadnesses and frayings of a terminally uncertain society in a socially-mediated age. Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban in 1990 to British parents. Raised in uMhlanga and Auckland, he currently lives in Cape Town, where he works as a writer and as the publisher of uHlanga Press.

The Myth of This Is That Weíre All in This Together

Mulgrew, Nick

Eclectic, eccentric and eloquent, Modern Rasputin establishes Rosa Lyster as one of South Africa's most exciting young writers. Diving into a (not entirely made-up) world of precocious children, minor royalty, Russian prisons, and electrocuting water faucets, Lyster's debut is a testament to the wild machinations of imagination and the soft poignancies of friendship, and provides one of the most unpredictable and cosmopolitan collections from South Africa in years.

Modern Rasputin

Lyster, Rosa

How many abortions have fallen out of your mouth while counting the men in your life?
Madness sits at the dinner table, too, saying grace with one eye open.
--
This highly-anticipated debut collection from one of the country’s most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma’s exploration of blackness, womxnhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing. In them, Putuma explodes the idea of authority in various spaces – academia, religion, politics, relationships – to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt.
Through grief and memory, pain and joy, sex and self-care, Collective Amnesia is a powerful appraisal, reminder and revelation of all that has been forgotten and ignored, both in South African society, and within ourselves.

Collective Amnesia

Putuma, Koleka

In an extraordinary debut, Megan Ross writes the uneasy truths about unexpected motherhood and all its emotional detritus. In deftly and experimentally navigating the angst, joy and self-reckoning that comes with the choices and misadventures of young womanhood, this is a collection that brings together the evocative with the provocative, and the feminist with the personal, in a bold and startling poetic style. Hallucinatory, image-wet, and navigating the eternal tides of spirit and body, Milk Fever is a chimeric dreamscape in which a woman reconfigures, remembers and rebirths herself.

Milk Fever

Ross, Megan

Voices from Another Room

Payne, Stuart

In his moving debut collection, Musawenkosi Khanyile speaks for the heartache, perseverance and untriumphant triumph of township life. Through snapshots and memories of family and community, centred around the boy- and young manhood of a single narrator, All The Places is a rare and compelling poetic Bildungsroman, with the ambition and scope of a novel, paired with (and pared down to) minimalist and clear-eyed verse.Concurrently original and quintessentially South African, these poems mark Khanyile out as a skilled stylist and storyteller – a frank and important new voice in South African literature.

All the Places

Khanyile, Musawenkosi

In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime. Half-forgotten, it has never appeared in a South African edition - until now. Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.

Malibongwe: Poems from the Struggle by ANC Women

Imbued with a sense of history - not to mention an ample wit and sharp eye for irony - C.J. Driver's first full collection of poems since 2005 is cause for celebration. Selected from the many poems Driver has written and published in magazines, booklets, and anthologies since his professional retirement in 2000, Still Further manages to take in the international scope of his many careers: as anti-apartheid activist, teacher, headmaster, and - of course - as writer and poet. 
While showing an impressive range of formal poetics, weighty philosophy, and Driver's trademark political forthrightness, this is a book bound by love, replete with reflections on family, companionship, and old friends remembered. As such, this collection does not just portray one of South Africa's great living poets; Still Further is a testament to the value of people - no matter how great or humble - whose shared lives and histories make one's own life worth living. Affirming, immersive, and generously conceived, this is a must for any serious reader of English poetry.

Still Further

Driver, C. J.

Imibongo kaMbungwana itsho ngentsholo eyodwa kwisixa semibongo ekhoyo ngesiXhosa. Ilizwi lakhe liyolula libinze kanobom nokuba selitsholozela phantsi. Le mibongo ithwele ubumbaxa bothando, ubunxadanxada bokuzukisa ikhaya, nenquleqhu eninzi yeenkanuko zomzimba kunye nokusekeka kweminqweno yentliziyo. Akathi gontshi naxa sele ethetha ngemiba yosapho evame ukuba nembali enzima nethe mpa amabibi angasese. Ubhala isiXhosa esiphilileyo nesisaya kuphila. Le mibongo imnombo unabileyo, itsho ngemifanekiso egqamileyo, yenza umqela ovakalayo kwizithethe ezikhoyo zokumela amalungelo okuziphatha nokuzikhunga. 
Mthunzikazi A. Mbungwana's poems have a loaded winsomeness that has no parallel in modern isiXhosa poetry. With a remarkably poised voice, Mbungwana makes poems that are as assertive when they are explicit as when they are subtle. Here is no easy comfort about love's lasting ramifications, nor the sometimes tender but ultimately stifling idea of home. Nevertheless, Mbungwana captures the giddy ramblings of a desirous heart, as well as delving into the weighty histories of familial love and scandal, brandishing an isiXhosa that is both deeply literary and gloriously vital. With poems that echo out into each other, and lines insistently rooted in their imagery, Mbungwana finds a way through the eternal and internal contest between the opposing forces of glory and pain, in the process making her own mark in a long and proud poetic tradition.

Unam Wena (Xhosa Edition)

Halvorsen, Tor

Mbungwana, Mthunzikazi A.

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