Advance Praise
"Part poem, part prayer, part mourning song; part warrior chant, part love song for a people, part revelation and so much more than the sum of its parts, A Is for Acholi risks all, as poetry must, to bring us to a place of reckoning with loss of homeland and its enormous implications. Loss that is here. And there. And everywhere. Okot Bitek offers us a brilliant work of testamentary poetics, which visually embeds and simultaneously explodes the silencing and erasure of colonialism, even as it simultaneously exploits an array of linguistic devices and practices to limn continuity of story and memory, telling tales as long as the night and short as time. By all means necessary, A Is for Acholi creates a space that is rampant, generative and necessary – it speaks to and for us all." – M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong! and She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
"A Is for Acholi is an Alphabet for diaspora and an Antidote for the colonized mind. Transcending cultural, geographical and temporal space, poet-scholar Otoniya J. Okot Bitek exploits the footnote, from reference to afterthought, in all its machinations, with Ancestor attitude and Academic-precision. Rupturing everything in her path Okot Bitek moves across this collection without looking both ways, without saying sorry. A is for Artist. Each page is a canvas, each word a world, each poem a galaxy." – Chantal Gibson, author of How She Read and with/holding
"A is for Acholi’s strategic erasures, alphabetic sequences that race ahead and double back, and flattened textual hierarchies, like those between the primary text and the footnote, turn the page into a vast field. The poems pattern and traverse this space. Convention and hierarchy are subject to reversal, to play, and the relationship between poem and reader becomes fluid. Acholi expands the conversation about form, race, diaspora and language that crackles among poets in Canada. That conversation, much like the writing in this volume, hurdles borders. Acholi’s cycles of return and repetition carry memory, yet they always turn toward our moment, and speak to the future." – Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroads and Magnetic Equator
