Fall 2022 Poetry Preview: Vox Humana by Adebe DeRango-Adem
Today we are launching our Fall 2022 Preview Series with our season opener, Vox Humana by Adebe DeRango-Adem!
Vox Humana (Latin for “human voice”) is driven by a sense of political urgency to probe the ethics of agency in a world that actively resists the participation of some voices over others. In and through literary experiments with word and sound, utterance and song, Vox Humana considers the different ways a body can assert, recount, proclaim, thus underscoring the urgency of doing so against the de-voicing effects of racism and institutional violence.
“Vox Humana by Adebe DeRango-Adem crackles with lexical and corporeal electricity,” writes Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour. “This is poetry that scans like lightning across a slate-blue sky, slashing the page with its power. Through its measurements of Blackness, miscegenation, migration, identity, the body, and the body politic, Vox Humana is the voice you have been waiting to hear. An incendiary cri de coeur for our times.”
We’re delighted to share an introduction from the author herself!
In addition, we’ve selected an excerpt from the book, which you can view below. Vox Humana will be released on September 8, 2022, and is available now for pre-order, either from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore.
Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka. She is the author of three previous full-length poetry books to date: Ex Nihilo, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Terra Incognita, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and The Unmooring. A poem from The Unmooring was featured in the 2019 Poem-In-Your-Pocket anthology, co-created by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets. Adebe served as the 2019-20 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence with Twelve Literary Arts (Cleveland, Ohio) and was selected by Sonia Sanchez as winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. She lives in Toronto.
