Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Collected Poems, 1998–2020 (African Poetry Book)

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Collected Poems, 1998–2020 (African Poetry Book)

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the first major poet out of Africa’s oldest republic of Liberia since the nation’s founding and remains one of the most important poets from Africa. Spanning two decades of work, the poems in this collection tell stories of Wesley’s homeland that would have otherwise been forgotten. As she recounts her life as a refugee, mother, wife, and African woman, Wesley also remembers the Liberians who were killed in the fourteen-year civil war, the hundreds of thousands silenced and unable to tell their own stories. In conversation with Africa and her new homeland of America, Wesley’s craft is imbued with Grebo oral tradition, bringing her language alive as she makes the reader cry out in anger or laughter. On one page you may find reason to mourn the brutality of war, and on the next, a reason to laugh about the beauty of family or at the small wonders of everyday life. Poetry, to Wesley, is not about words; it is about the story, the story of the living seeking to give new life to both the living and those she calls the dead living. “Today [Patricia Jabbeh] Wesley is among the most celebrated poets of the new African diaspora. . . . Wesley is a rare figure: an African woman poet who has received high honors and become a public figure whose words have reshaped the public and literary discourse about Liberia. . . . It has taken years for her to arrive at the position she holds. She has had to navigate an inability in many to imagine an African poet of her gifts and presence. But her work has overcome this and created the future she foresaw as a child.”―Gabeba Baderoon, from the introduction Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a professor of English, creative writing, and African literature at Pennsylvania State University–Altoona. She immigrated to the United States with her husband and children in 1991, during the First Liberian Civil War. Wesley is the author of six collections of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems , Becoming Ebony , and When the Wanderers Come Home (Nebraska, 2016).  Kwame Dawes is a professor of literary arts at Brown University and the director and series editor of the African Poetry Book Fund.  Marguerite L. Harrold is the author of Chicago House Music: Culture and Community . She is a PhD student in English (creative writing) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.  Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. She is the author of three collections of poetry: The Dream in the Next Body , A Hundred Silences , and The History of Intimacy . She teaches at Pennsylvania State University.