Photo by Andile Buka
EVERYTHING IS A DEATHLY FLOWER
Maneo Mohale
September 2019
66pp
200x130mm
ISBN: 978-0-6398108-2-9
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Winner of the 2020 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry
Finalist for the 2020 Ingrid Jonker Prize
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In one of the most anticipated debut collections of recent years, Maneo Mohale reckons boldly with the experience of – and the reconstruction of a life after – a sexual assault.
Mohale’s unapologetic and disarming voice carries through a budding and blooming garden of poetics, rooted in a contemporary southern African tradition, but springing forth in queer and radical new directions. Indeed, this is a work encompassing the full, often contradictory, and seldom complete process of healing: where relations must be chosen as well as made; where time becomes non-linear and language insufficient; where nothing is what it seems, yet everything is what it is.
Maneo Mohale was born in 1992 in Benoni. Their work has appeared in Jalada, Prufrock, the New York Times, the Mail & Guardian, spectrum.za, and others. They are a 2016 Bitch Media Global Feminism Fellow, and have been longlisted twice for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award.
After living in Canada for five years, they now live in Johannesburg, where they work as an editor and writer. This is their first book.