Mother Tongues
Poems

Tsitsi Ella Jaji (Author)

9780810141353, Northwestern University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 November 2019

96 pages
22.3 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.162 kg

Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize

Tsitsi Ella Jaji's second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear.

This is what we have done since before the border between wild and free was pinned

The body politics of personal narratives embed into poems that collect the cycles of lives and languages that have shaped the wonders and worlds of Africa and America. 

Jaji's artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and present. The tongues that capture and claim the losses, ironies, and a poet's human evolution. How deep does your language go back? The language of your childhood, the language of our aging? How deeply do we wear and hear our fore-tongues? How close do we sometimes forget they are? Mother Tongues is the gift, a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.

• Mother Tongues
• Table of Contents (i)
• Dedication: Our lingering embrace iii
• mother tongue (1)
• 1 On the Isle of Lesbos
• Our Mother of Stone
• Daughtering
• And They Didn'
  t Die
• In Praise of the Great Cat
• * lingua: corral
• Five Bagatelles
• Fingerings
• flare
• Symphony Dinner with Piano Soloist
• Blue Note
• Bandwagon
• Cooking with Miles
• Relaxing with Miles
• * lingua: tongue-tied
• Tell me something good
• A Song at Dawn
• Auxiliary
• Prelude to a Kiss
• First Guardian of Flight: The Angel of Time
• Second Guardian of Flight: The Angel of Refinement
• After Tonsure
• * lingua: ladyfingers
• Ethiopia Stretches Forth Her Hands
• Manual for Initiation into the Zebra Sisterhood
• Electioneered
• Old News
• After the Coup (or Not)
• The Crystal River
• Profile
• How I Write
• * lingua: good tast
• Real Simple
• Way Out West
• Autumn Leaves
• Marvin in Stereo/Right Ear
• Marvin in Stereo/Left Ear
• morning, 11.9.16
• Burying Willie, Our Lion
• Malick Sidibé
  '
  s Camera Calls
• * lingua: gorgon
• Benin Bronze
• Unaccompanied Minor
• Children'
  s Swings
• Pond in Museum Garden
• Ritual Object
• The Body Counts
• at war
• Wildcat
• * lingua: a quick tongue
• The Graves Suite
• Ballade: Thyroid Goes Rogue
• 3 Intermezzi for Unaccompanied Thyroid
• Misterioso: Iodine 131 Meets the Royal Thyroid
• Cadenza: Thyroid Rides Again
• Koan of the Great Cat
• * lingua: babble
• We are the darker sister
• Boy Lotus
• Three Lessons on a Friday
• Stumbling Block
• Facing El Greco
• When Thomas Finally Rolled Up, I Said
• Infinitive