"We are incapable of reigning in nature": Manthipe Moila interviewed by Megan Ross

In this wide-ranging interview, Megan Ross chats to debut poet Manthipe (Manti) Moila about her poetry collection Rootbound, the joys and limitations of language, and the poets who influence and inspire her own work.

Congratulations on Rootbound! Can you tell us about the journey of writing your debut collection? What was the seed that grew into this book?

Thank you so much. The journey of writing Rootbound was like a journey to myself. I had a couple of attempts at writing a collection that were lacking because I didn’t have the tools or courage to explore the matter at the core of the collection, which is that of my first heartbreak. My relationship with my father was a complex one, and I always thought he would return, after unceremoniously dipping from my life, but he never did. His death made all the conversations I wanted to have with him an impossibility. So I used literature as a medium to say what I needed to say. 

The title, Rootbound, is evocative and layered. What does it signify for you, and how does it reflect the central themes of the collection?

Yes! I had three titles in mind and though Rootbound was the least flashy, it definitely was the one that did the most heavy lifting. On a surface level, the title is a nod to the botanical motif that threads through the collection. However, the title is also a metaphor for the state the speaker of the collection starts out in: stifled, trapped, in need of a new environment. One’s ‘roots’ are also seen as the true, eternal home. To be alienated from your roots is necessarily to have an identity crisis of existential proportions. In a more globalized landscape where cultures shift constantly, I wondered if there was room to complicate this narrative. What does it mean now, in the digital age, and in the age of mass migration, to feel at home, or to have roots? I’d love to give the reader room to make their own connections, and make the collection theirs. 

Many of your poems wrestle with identity, belonging, and memory. How do your personal experiences and background as a South African shape your poetic voice, especially with your being based in South Korea? (I lived in Bangkok for a while, so I am so excited to read a collection by another African poet whose feet are currently in Asia!)

I know I’m probably not supposed to say this, as in literary and academic spaces it’s a big no-no for the speaker and author to be seen as one, but I want to answer earnestly: this is a deeply personal book and my experiences have shaped it as a work of art. I drew directly from my experiences when writing, as I wanted to feel anchored in my writing. For example, there is Korean incorporated into the collection. I did not do that just because I thought it would look cool – it’s more that the Korean language is also something that I am grappling with. It’s difficult, I’m not as good at it as I ought to be by now, but I love the language. I also operate in the language on a day-to-day basis, so it made an impression on me that I wanted to be reflected in the book. I now find it fascinating that I can get through a (simple) Korean novel but not even a picture book in my mother tongue. Identities are so much more slippery and complex, I think, than we would like to admit. The spaces that the body occupies, be they physical or psychological, leave their mark.  

Your work blurs the boundaries between the natural and emotional worlds. How do you use nature as metaphor in your poetry?

I find that phrasing interesting, as it kind of touches on one of the things I was contemplating while writing the collection. I wanted the different stages that a houseplant goes through to reflect or run parallel to the speaker’s own journey. However, houseplants are just that – a use of nature, a manipulation of it. I sometimes have trouble contending with the natural world in all its glorious terror. Houseplants are a manicured, clamped down version of nature that affords people some of the benefits of nature – beauty, calm etc. – without having to deal with the threatening aspects. The word ‘bound’ makes up half of the title for a reason: I love my houseplants, and my plant poems, but there’s something to be said about how we are incapable of reigning in nature, even in language; or especially in language. 

Were there any particular poets, books, or artistic influences that guided or inspired you during the creation of this collection?

Funny that you ask – you’re actually one of them! I love Milk Fever and I would underline lines I loved, read and reread poems, pluck out certain words from your verses and try to turn those into poems of my own. So this interview truly is a full circle moment. Others who I drew from were Maneo Mohale, Mark Strand, Ocean Vuong, and I.S Jones. In fact, in the collection there are poems that draw from specific lines in poems I admire. I found, and became obsessed with Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. There’s my attempt at a contrapuntal inspired by Safia Elhillo, and a dialogue poem inspired by Franny Choi and Sumita Chakraborty. For me, poetry begets poetry, and though I currently draw heavily from my experiences, I also draw from individuals or individual poems that I admire. 

Poetry can be both deeply personal and universally resonant. How do you navigate the line between vulnerability and craft in your work?

Well, I hope! There’s room for both in poetry. There’s room for anything in poetry really – it’s a house of endless rooms. That being said, I think that in order to keep from drowning one’s work in sentimentality, craft needs to be a practice. I try to be as vulnerable as possible in the initial stages of penning a poem. That’s the only way I can get it out. Then, as I become more distant from the poem – after having put it away, or getting feedback on it – I use my craft skills to give the poem shape, form and coherence. 

Craft is one of those things that I’m consistently working on. For example, when I was writing the collection, I was reading Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, as well as The Poet’s Companion by Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio (I’m still working through them actually). I also would do online writing workshops with a friend in which we opened each session with a poem and some poetry analysis. 

Photograph by Rae Ann Bochanyin

How has working with uHlanga shaped your experience as a debut author? What was the editing and publishing process like for you?

It’s been a dream come true. Editing was really fun, initially, then I kind of freaked out towards the end as we neared the completion of the collection. I find it really hard to edit, especially poetry because when is a poem really done? The answer could be after the 6th draft or it could be never. I’m glad I had Nick to give his perspective on the work, but also to help me manage my anxieties and insecurities. There were bouts of imposter syndrome that hit so hard I would wonder if my poetry would ruin poetry itself. I couldn’t have done it without uHlanga, and my friends and beta readers who were there for me throughout the process. Publishing has been challenging since I’m so far away from home and feel quite at a distance from the collection though it is out in the world. I wasn’t emotionally prepared for that. So after giving it more thought, editing and publishing have been quite difficult actually, but I think that’s the nature of the work.

What do you hope readers will feel or take away after reading Rootbound?

I don’t really want to impose too much. I know what the collection means for me, and what I currently take away from it. However, each reader brings themselves into whatever they are reading, and they kind of co-create the world of the book, poem, whatever it may be. Sure, I have themes, organising principles, a singular speaker (mostly) but I think it’s up to the reader to work with what I’m giving them and come away from the work with whatever they want or need. It’s a very scary prospect for my work to no longer belong to me in that way but I feel like it’s also appropriate.

And lastly, are you working on anything new (that you could potentially tell us about)?

I can dish a little bit. I’m working on a story-in-verse set in a pre-apocalyptic/apocalyptic world. It’s a huge departure from Rootbound, very challenging and currently probably a little beyond me. But I’m teaching myself how to write the book as I go. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time so I’m excited to see how the project shapes up. 

Announcing a corpse is also a garden by Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal

uHlanga is thrilled to announce the August 2025 publication of a corpse is also a garden, poems by Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal, translated from the Afrikaans by the poet.

This is our very first – but certainly not the last – book of South African poetry in translation. This would be a milestone in itself, but this is an irresistible book in its own right.

Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal is one of the leading young Afrikaans poets of his generation. In this, a self-translated selection of poems from his first two collections, readers in English get to experience Odendaal's stunningly confident and self-deconstructing work for the first time.

Odendaal's understated, precise style exhibits a maturity beyond his years – whether he is reckoning with the hideous deeds of his ancestors, the tribulations of young love, or the various everyday beauties and horrors of modern South Africa.

These are poems that affirm our deepest and most profound connections, both with each other and our environments – the places that birth us, and the earth to which we all return.

Photo by Liese Kuhn

Pieter Madibuseng Odendaal is a writer, translator, musician and educator.

His debut poetry collection in Afrikaans, asof geen berge ooit hier gewoon het nie, won the 2019 Ingrid Jonker Prize; his second collection, Ontaard, received the 2024 Eugène Marais Prize and the NIHSS Award for Poetry, while his play Droomwerk was nominated for the Hertzog Prize for Drama.

In 2024, Odendaal was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans. His spoken word album, also titled Ontaard, was released in 2025.

This is his first book in English.


a corpse is also a garden launches in August 2025. Please sign up to our email newsletter or our accounts on social media to keep up to date with launch events and more uHlanga news!

"Following the silk rope of your words": Megan Ross interviews Helen Moffett

In the first of a (hopefully) semi-regular series of interviews with and between uHlanga poets, Milk Fever author Megan Ross chats with Helen Moffett about her award-winning 2016 release Prunings, as well as all of the other important things she tends to in her literary career – editing, mentoring, and living.

Photo by Martine Bisagne

MR: Dr Moffett, you're a literary maven with wide, outstretched arms, enveloping every artist in your care with support and expert encouragement. How do you balance your editing work with your poetry work, or do you feel the two sort of overlap in some way?

HM: Thank you. Those are very kind words. I do what I do as a form of mothering/nurturing, and it meets a very deep need in me. There’s no overlap other than the kind of ongoing sparking that creates poems from everyday events and ideas – a lovely aspect of editing is that it involves constantly learning new things, and that feeds the poems – or at least, feeds the borehole from whence poetry comes.

As for balance, I’m both bad and good at this: bad because I am always sacrificing myself as a writer for my editing, because I get so passionately involved with whatever and whoever I’m working on as an editor. But good in that writing poetry is often something I HAVE to do, a compulsion, and it drives the other stuff out, even if only for half an hour now and again.

MR: As a many-times published author, but as ‘our’ author in the case of Prunings, what drew you to publishing with uHlanga, and do you feel a kind of, if any, kinship with other poets who we have published?

HM: The answer is simple: I trusted Nick. The story of how uHlanga came to publish Prunings is a delightful one, and a sequence of events that could probably only happen in South Africa. I’d invited some of my indie publishing friends to lunch on my patio, and the small group included Nick (I was editing his short stories at the time) and Colleen Higgs of Modjaji, who’d published Strange Fruit. We were all discussing what I should do with the poems that didn’t make it into Strange Fruit because they didn’t fit the loose narrative (it’s largely about my infertility), and we came up with the idea of Prunings. I thought it would only make up a chapbook, and Colleen didn’t do chapbooks, but Nick did. He offered to publish on the spot, I walked into the house to find an unfinished painting by the late Ellaphie Ward (she was my botanist dad’s illustrator), and suggested we use it as a cover – and that was that. Colleen, Nick and publishing genius Arthur Attwell (of Electric Book Works) were sharing a ride home, and when they were in the car, Arthur said “You’re going to publish Helen’s collection without even seeing it first?” Nick, all the gods bless him, said “It’s a no-brainer.” It did help that Strange Fruit was by local poetry standards a bestseller (it’s gone into eight print runs, even if only about a hundred each time). He sent a cover design three hours later, and that’s the one we used; and there was enough material that it did make up a collection, not a chapbook.

The informality of our arrangement meant that Nick chose the poems from the scatterings I dumped in his lap, sometimes taking only fragments, and in one case, just one line. When we got to editing, I would sometimes strike out lines because I was unsure of them, and he left those lines in, but with the strike-outs visible. This got a lot of favourable comment. I said one line in a poem was sentimental, so Nick rewrote it, and is credited with it in the collection. So he had a free hand and intervened to the point of collaboration, which would not have worked with Strange Fruit, which was heart’s blood stuff.

Kinship with other uHlanga poets: I think a sense of awe would be more fitting. I am very proud to be published alongside such exceptionally creative and slant (in the Emily Dickinson sense) poets.

MR: In a similar vein, what ‘draws’ one, or in this case, yourself, to a particular publisher? 

HM: I write across multiple genres, so I’m very practical. Bookstorm works well for my non-fiction trade titles, academic presses publish my research writings, a British commercial publisher did our erotica, and so on. I don’t know that I could have done Strange Fruit with anyone else other than Modjaji (even though UCT Press accepted it first): I needed a feminist and someone I trusted, a friend, as a publisher. Colleen guided me, then Rustum Kozain (once again, a close and trusted friend) did the line edit, and the whole thing was emotionally exposing in a way that much of my writing isn’t. So I look at the fit.

When it comes to poetry, it has to be someone I care about and trust. So that’s Nick, Colleen and Karina (of Karavan Press, who will possibly publish my next collection/s). There are other excellent poetry publishers in SA (brave and foolhardy souls) – thinking of Dryad Press, Deep South, Botsoso and others – but I need someone at the helm I feel personally close to. 

MR: It's been 16 years (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT) since Modjaji Books published Strange Fruit. We know that books can take one on certain journeys, sometimes to the heart of painful things, and in a more outward way, to events, to new people, to new spaces... Where did Strange Fruit take you, and, on that note, did Prunings take you anywhere that Strange Fruit didn't?

HM: Oh my hat, how long have you got? Let’s start with Prunings, which won the SALA for poetry in its year, and meant I could describe myself as an “award-winning poet”. It got more critical recognition and attention than Strange Fruit, but I felt it showcased my craft (even though I still think “WHAT craft?”) rather than my guts and marrow. I do love it, though.

For years after we published Strange Fruit, I got messages and emails (and that was in the early days of social media, so it was much harder for people to track me down) from women (and one man) telling me how they felt seen, understood, that their battles with infertility, miscarriages, menopause, and the whole panoply of Wimmin’s Stuff that is veiled in most (all) societies, were acknowledged, given expression. I was constantly moved by the private notes of pain, the personal messages telling me my poems had comforted them. I STILL get these, 16 years later!

Just one of those emails from a stranger thanking me for voicing their experience would have been reward enough. But there’s more. A former South African, Peter Midgley, then at the University of Alberta Press, came across Strange Fruit, and gave it to one of his closest friends, the respected Canadian poet, Kimmy Beach. She had also battled with infertility. So this intense friendship sprang up between us, complete strangers. And that in turn led to a cascade of events in which I got invited to Western Canada on a poetry tour (yes, The Canadian government actually sponsors such things!) I went road-tripping with Peter, his lovely spice Julie, and Kimmy, crossing the Rockies for three mind-blowing days, visiting the dinosaur badlands of Drumheller, reading my poems in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton, teaching at a creative non-fiction workshop in Victoria, more road-tripping to Tofino on the western edge of Vancouver island (the only place in the world more beautiful than the Cape). I still pinch myself to think: poetry took me there. (TBH, it was Peter, Kimmy and Canadian author Myrl Coulter, whose memoir I had just edited, who made it happen.)

I’m not done yet! Last year I went on a residential fellowship with 20 other brilliant academics from around the world, and after one memorable evening of wine and song around the communal fireplace, I fetched two copies of Strange Fruit from my office and gave them almost at random to two of my new Fellows (we were only weeks into the semester). One – a tax law expert! – turned out to be a poet who’d published a brilliant and agonising collection about the experience of loving his profoundly autistic son. He subsequently became one of my best friends. A few days later, the other, an internationally honoured theoretical physicist, said he’d read the collection, and could I guess which his favourite poem was? I was cynical: it was sure to be one of the funny dirty ones, probably about penises. Nope. It was “Always”, a love poem. With a pure sincerity only possible for those for whom English is not a mother tongue, he told me that reading it, he realised he and I shared identical views on love. And at regular intervals that semester, he would ask me to read the poem to him. I’d been resolutely and contentedly single for over ten years (four and a half of those with Long Covid), we were both fiercely committed to our work and residency projects (and the other Fellows); I doubt I will ever get over the shock of finding myself plunging into a relationship with someone so much my opposite, we were effectively from different planets. I still wake up in the mornings going WTAF. And yet, as of today, we are still a going concern in spite of not having been in the same time zone once in the last five months. (He also got me into wild swimming, and that has changed my life and health beyond recognition, a gift that can’t be taken away.)

So, to put it mildly, Strange Fruit changed my life. And this is why we should write poetry, why we must keep publishing it. I have a poem in progress about how years, decades after writing a poem, it can still bring someone to your door, following the silk rope of your words. Write that poem.

MR: And lastly, are you working on anything new (that you could potentially tell us about)?

HM: I have three collections bubbling away. One was mostly written over ten years ago, but a lot of that impetus went into my novel Charlotte, so that clutch of poems is still in a drawer. Then in 2020/21, our family went through the agony of my sister being in Covid ICU for SIXTY. FIVE. DAYS. I wrote poems during that utter hell (what else could I do?), and have a slim collection provisionally titled “We Must Caution You”, a phrase her doctors used when warning us not to expect her recovery. (She lived: a bona fide miracle.) And I’m now writing lots and lots of (bad) poems about the regeneration and transformation of the last ten months of my life, provisionally called “Spell”. Karina and I are talking about how we could possibly combine these unpublished collections, but it’s all up in the air, and the current poems need to be corralled into a drawer for composting.

Thank you for asking these questions. Answering them has given me joy.

Announcing Owele by Sihle Ntuli

uHlanga is proud to announce the July 2025 release of Owele, the third full-length collection by Durban-born and -based poet Sihle Ntuli.

Owele is an ambitious collection that switches at ease between English and isiZulu, giving readers of either language a remarkable literary experience. Ntuli’s unique, jazz-inflected poetry here reaches a new level of innovation, vulnerability and delight. The book additionally features beautiful cover and inside photographs of the uMngeni Valley by Durban-based photographer Samora Chapman.

Owele’s inventive and award-winning poems meditate on the origins of Ntuli’s family, clan and language through the earthen-toned rivers of the Zulu world:

A family of rivers flows through the land. Their waters gather, merge and split. But even twins must create their own paths – where do their individual journeys begin, and how far must they travel to their shared destination, the vast and turbulent ocean?

The history of the land becomes the history of the person – but do rivers flow to a beat as blood does? The answers are not always as clear as the surface suggests.

Photograph © Centre for Stories

Sihle Ntuli was born in KwaMashu in 1990. He holds an MA in Classics from Rhodes University, Makhanda, and has lectured at the Universities of Johannesburg and the Free State. He has also held fellowships at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies and the Centre for Stories, Western Australia.

He is the author of two previous collections of poetry and two chapbooks, including Rumblin’, previously published by uHlanga. He is the winner of the 2024/2025 Diann Blakely Poetry Competition, a 2024 Best of the Net winner, and a former editor of New Contrast.

He lives in Durban.

Owele launches in July 2025. Please sign up to our email newsletter or our accounts on social media to keep up to date with launch events and more uHlanga news!

Announcing Rootbound by Manthipe Moila

We are proud to announce the June 2025 release of Rootbound by Manthipe Moila, the debut of the Johannesburg-born, Seoul-based poet.

This has been a collection long in the making, and we’re pleased to be publishing it as uHlanga celebrates ten years of publishing South African poetry books.

An absent father dies. Home is no longer so homely. And yet, wherever you go, you cannot escape yourself. Moila’s captivating debut follows a young woman as she finds her place between the blossoming South Africa of her past and the blustery South Korea of her present.

How does one grow in a new place, in a new language? Is it possible to grow new roots, or does pain forever bind us to the past? Drawing on the botanical environment – as well as a self-made jungle of houseplants – Moila meditates on memory and loss, the thrills of exploration, and the journey of becoming. A fresh, inventive and essential new voice in South African literature.

Photograph by Rae Ann Bochanyin

Manthipe Moila was born in 1994 and is from Johannesburg. She holds a BA Hons. in English Literature from Rhodes University, Makhanda. Her poetry has been published widely, including in New Contrast, 20.35 Africa, Kalahari Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Agbowó, A Long House, and Saranac Review.

She is currently based in Seoul, South Korea, surrounded by far too many houseplants.

This book features beautiful collage work by Taipei-based South African artist and poet Leora Joy Jones. A real cross-continental collaboration!

Manthipe Moila will be in South Africa later this year to launch Rootbound in Cape Town and Gauteng. Sign up to our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram or Facebook, to make sure you don’t miss out on her events – as well as the clutch of new books we’ll be bringing out later this year.