Sheer poetic joy, though I am sure I don’t have the full effect because I haven’t read Chaucer. The author, Patience Agbabi, is a celebrated spoken word performer, born in England, of Nigerian descent.
An astrolabe is a mechanism for taking measurements of the stars, it means literally, star taker, and has an elegant circular shape with precision nodes or engravings. This piece speaks to how we face the otherworldliness of Heaven in our (often insufficient) prayers, and by how Earth too can feel otherworldly. This poem fell in…
This is performance poetry that lives or dies by the tongue. Johnson’s reflections are perfectly sharp and honed to be light and substantial at the same time. His sound really is sublime, and he makes his Jamaican patois an asset, not only a statement, in several places. This poem shows his complex multi-dimensionality as a…
