Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems: 170 (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) - Softcover

Mulalu, Tawanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691239037 ISBN 13: 9780691239033

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2022

Synopsis

The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry

Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor.

The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring―one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: “The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country.”

About this title

About the Author

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1997. He is the author of the chapbook Nearness, and his poems have appeared in many publications, including the Paris Review, Brittle Paper, and Lolwe. He lives in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691239037
• ISBN 13: 9780691239033
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104