"The poet is endemic with life itself," Will Alexander once said, and in
this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten,
he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal
amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. "This being the ballet
of the forgotten," he writes as diasporic witness, "of refracted
boundary points as venom." The volume's opening poem pays homage to the
innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an
encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo--two
writers whose luminous art suffered "colonial wrath through refraction."
A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the
Congo as "charged aural colony" and "primal interconnection," a
"subliminal psychic force" with a colonial and postcolonial history
dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander's improvisatory cosmicity
pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance--incantatory and
swirling with magical laterality and recovery.