Refractive Africa

With bright, vibrating cover art by the poet himself, Will Alexander’s Refractive Africa is “an invisible saurian ballet / that allowed you to probe language as borderless ozone.” In this collection, the poet’s English flies far from his native Los Angeles in praise of “two of Africa’s verbal giants, Amos Tutuola and Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo”:

here I am
leaping the nervous wall of your writing
so that seething & movement transpire inside me.

The opening section, “Based on the Bush of Ghosts,” begins “above dubious salt infernos” as it traces Tutuola’s “uneasy brilliance … rising & falling / through snowflakes & kindling.” We enter the book’s closing section, “Eruption from the Compound of Living,” dedicated to Rabearivelo,“[b]eneath a luminous compound equator.” These poems offer hybrid biographical sketches that lovingly reclaim writers who have been maligned for their inventive use of colonial languages.

Alexander’s tightly controlled verse, free of punctuation but with carefully calibrated line breaks, resists easy interpretation as the poet seeks “to peer through & beyond / the pitch of European corrosion.” Instead of providing easy answers, this work inspires a meditative trance that shifts how we might understand the relationship between words. In his preface, Alexander unpacks his use of British enunciation as a tool that allows “an ironic otherness … to invade the text.” 

This collection’s strength lies in the way it shows us how meaning might leap away, as it asks us to dissect the complicated genealogy of the English language. From “glossolalias of straw” to “gris-gris moons,” Alexander’s poems delight as they work spells that culminate in a sense of being “alive in this zone of refracted Africa.”