Nyamuteza

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets What does it mean for one to begin from the point of view of a Black thought? Nyamuteza, named for the planet Pluto in the East African Native language of Runyankore, opens with a Black dictionary definition of four of the brightest objects of the Kuiper Belt. The sonorous book-length poem is a love song that unravels the affective from the perspective of a village in rural Uganda devastated by the climate catastrophe of a hailstorm. The same population is tasked with producing food for the community. Jedidiah Mugarura uses incantation as a mode of expression with a novelistic attention to story. In Nyamuteza the hail is likened to stars and African Nkore ideology is infused with Black thought in seeking a language toward survivance.