Nearness

“Tawanda Mulalu’s Nearness is, as a collection of poems—and as a compilation of visions and encounters—a profound and beautiful statement of the self, and of the ways in which the self generates—and reverberates—a community of feeling, feeling throughout community, and back again. The poems are panoramic yet precise. They illuminate self-determination as world-remaking, world-remaking as arrangement, arrangement as preparation, preparation as precarity, precarity as love letter, and love letter as an almost posthumous kind of fidelity to feeling. The opening and closing poems (Prayer and Poetry in America), to cite two of the most immediate examples, are hard-winning atlases, virtuosic memorials in multiple dimensions. Although what they truly are, and what they, more truly, will become, is beyond anything I might be able to say about them. And the precise panorama in between. I am excited for how this work will evolve in the company of you, imminent readers. Tawanda Mulalu’s Nearness will, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, shift the scenery.”