Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, Tsitsi Ella Jaji's second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore.
The poems in Tsitsi Ella Jaji's Beating the Graves meditate on the meaning of living in diaspora, an experience increasingly common among contemporary Zimbabweans. Vivid evocations of the landscape of Zimbabwe filter critiques of contemporary political conditions and ecological challenges, veiled in the multiple meanings of poetic metaphor.