We're very proud to announce the release of An Illuminated Darkness, the debut collection from Jacques Coetzee, a stalwart of the Cape Town poetry scene.

Coetzee's poetry is extraordinary. Living with visual impairment since birth, and blindness for the majority of his life, his poetics is necessarily different to those of sighted writers. Of course, his experiences are different, too. His poems are filled with unwanted prayers, resented kindnesses, and other proofs that living with visual impairment is less about matters of sight than it is about problems of perception; most often, other people's.

But a life without mirrors is not a life without self-examination. On the contrary, Jacques’s debut is a manifesto of personhood, a portrait of a world brought into being by its textures, its movements, and – most importantly – its music. Easy-flowing and sensuous, this is a collection of the unexpected, the strange, and the suddenly beautiful.

Representation matters too, of course. Blind poets are rare in South African letters, and because of this, we're trying to make our books more accessible. We are collaborating with Blind SA to make Jacques' book into braille editions for print-disabled readers, are having it made available on their soon-to-be-launched e-library service, and have even created an audiobook of Jacques reading the poems, which is free now to download and listen to on Soundcloud and our website.

Jacques Coetzee, born in 1972, matriculated from the Pioneer School for the Blind in Worcester. He has worked as a busker at the Cape Town Waterfront, and has tutored English literature to first- and second-year university students. In 2002 he obtained a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and in 2018, he and Barbara Fairhead published a joint anthology of poems, The Love Sheet. He currently lives in Cape Town, where he is a singer-songwriter in the band Red Earth & Rust.

An Illuminated Darkness is available through all good bookstores in SA and Namibia, as well as through the African Books Collective, from 1 September 2020.