Carnaval

In Carnaval, Tsitsi Jaji offers us a taste of her ease with the surreal, the experimental, and the lyric poem. Founded on a revelatory understanding of music theory and composition, Carnaval contains poems that range from the poet’s plumbing of memory, shaped by her life in and outside of Zimbabwe, to the swirling music of her dialogue with classical musical forms. Her poems speak to the challenges of finding meaning in the concept and reality of home. Her experimentation with form seems inevitable: she is, after all, seeking to reflect the cosmopolitan complications of a twenty-first century African sensibility.

—Kwame Dawes