Named after the poet’s mother, ‘mamaseko is a collection of introspective lyrics and other poems dealing with the intersections of blood relationships and related identities. Thabile Makue questions what it means to be beings of blood—to relate by blood, to live by blood. In her poems Makue looks for traces of shared trauma and pain and asserts that wounds of the blood are healed by the same.

Named after the poet’s mother, ‘mamaseko is a collection of introspective lyrics and other poems dealing with the intersections of blood relationships and related identities. Thabile Makue questions what it means to be beings of blood—to relate by blood, to live by blood. In her poems Makue looks for traces of shared trauma and pain and asserts that wounds of the blood are healed by the same.

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly "scaled up" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts. In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014. This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

The global expansion of HIV programming (HIV "scale-up") and the growth of global health in the past decade reshaped politics, power, civic relations, and citizen subjectivities in countries across the globe. This book draws on interdisciplinary research from numerous sites in the Global South to examine the political dimensions of HIV and global health programming. The chapters reflect extensive methodological diversity and geographic range, yet exhibit striking resonance with the book’s core themes. Collectively, the authors paint a complex global portrait of a unique period in the social history of HIV, as the pandemic enters its fourth decade, and the global response reaches its peak. The book contemplates "scale-up" (and, subsequently, "scale-down") as an object of analysis and an historical shift in the politics of response to global crisis. Ultimately, HIV/AIDS campaigns provide a template for the broader expansion of global health projects and institutions. These transnational shifts and expansions necessitate further critical evaluations across social science and public health disciplines. By collecting diverse perspectives on the political legacies of HIV and global health, this book provides a unique history of the present, cataloguing emerging practices and policies that will have long-term social impacts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Public Health.

Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry Winner Julie Suk Award Winner Nigeria Prize for Literature shortlist Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father's pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living. Culminating in an imagined dialogue between the father and his deceased daughter in the intricate space of the family, Your Crib, My Qibla explores grief, the fleeting nature of healing, and the constant obsession of memory as a language to reach the dead.

In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival through migration.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, 'Gbenga Adeoba's collection Exodus focuses on forms of migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and economic opportunities. Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and place.

Like I knew, standing on the seashore, the hunger wracking a migrant’s body is movement. —from Romeo Oriogun’s “Migrant by the Sea” The Gathering of Bastards chronicles the movement of migrants as they navigate borders both internal and external. At the heart of these poems of vulnerability and sharp intelligence, the poet himself is the perpetual migrant embarked on forced journeys that take him across nations in West and North Africa, through Europe, and through American cities as he navigates the challenges of living through terror and loss and wrestles with the meaning of home.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, ‘Gbenga Adeoba’s collection Exodus focuses on forms of migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and economic opportunities. Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and place.

There Where It's So Bright in Me pries at the complexities of difference--race, religion, gender, nationality--that shape twenty-first-century geopolitical conditions. With work spanning more than thirty-five years and as one of the most prominent figures in contemporary African literature, Tanella Boni is uniquely positioned to test the distinctions of self, other, and belonging. Two twenty-first-century civil wars have made her West African home country of Côte d'Ivoire unstable. Abroad in the United States, Boni confronts the racialized violence that accompanies the idea of Blackness; in France, a second home since her university days, Boni encounters the nationalism roiling much of Europe as the consequences of (neo)colonialism shift the continent's ethnic and racial profile. What would it mean for the borders that segregate--for these social, political, cultural, personal, and historicizing forces that enshroud us--to lose their dominion? In a body under constant threat, how does the human spirit stay afloat? Boni's poetry is characterized by a hard-earned buoyancy, given her subject matter. Her empathy, insight, and plainspoken address are crucial contributions to the many difficult contemporary conversations we must engage.