ISBN:
9781772015164
Pages: 94 pp
Pub. Date:
May 17 2023
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.5"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE024000
- POETRY / American / African American & Black
- POETRY / Canadian
- POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss
- POETRY / Women Authors
COVID meditations from literary phenom Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Rife with the paradoxical forces of boredom and intensity, the early days of COVID-19 passed under an inescapable pall. The poems of Song & Dread seek quietude, order, refuge, and space within that shroud. They remind us of community, connectedness, and what is inherently shared. Here, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek becomes a record keeper, observing the contradictory, symbiotic relationship between the quotidian and the extraordinary. These works are of their time, while remembering an existence outside it. With a keen eye, Bitek documents the ways the strange can become normalized when there is no other option.
“I’m fascinated in how Okot Bitek’s book-length structures favour the extended sequence, and the cycle; composing individual poems that come together to form something far larger than the sum of their parts. The poems and poem of Song & Dread loops and swirls through language, song and thread, returning regularly to earlier points, allowing the structure of the extended sequence to propel that much further, forward.” – rob mclennan
