Full Description
2021 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
2021 Foreword Indies Finalist
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry
The poems in The Rinehart Frames seek to exhaust the labyrinths of ekphrasis. By juxtaposing the character of Rinehart from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man with the film 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami, the poems leap into secondary histories, spaces, and languages that encompass a collective yet varied consciousness of being.
Cheswayo Mphanza's collection questions the boundaries of diaspora and narrative through a tethering of voices and forms that infringe on monolithic categorizations of Blackness and what can be intersected with it. The poems continue the conversations of the infinite possibilities of the imagination to dabble in, with, and out of history.
Contents
Foreword by Kwame Dawes
Frame One
I
The Code of Hammurabi
Frame Two
Frame Three
Getting Lost with Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon
Frame Four
Lester Leaps In
II
Frame Five
Frame Six
Open Casket Body Double for Patrice Lumumba's Funeral
Notes toward a Biography of Henry Tayali
III
Frame Seven (with Director's Commentary*)
Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
Frame Eight
Auteur Poetica
Djibril Diop MambÉty's Scene Descriptions
IV
Frame Nine
A Stack of Shovels 43
That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure
Frame Ten
Amrita Sher-Gil Introductory Wall Texts
V
Frame Eleven
Pastoral
Paean to Chikumbi
At David Livingstone's Statue
Frame Twelve
Dear Suzanne
Attributions
Acknowledgments
