Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems

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The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry

Please make me pretty, I dont want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor.

The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teachers assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem prayers and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarringone in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country.

Reviews

"Incredible. . . .A stunningly good book of poems."---Elisa Gabbert, New York Times
"Tawanda Mulalu's first book is an energetic and energizing assemblage of restlessly shifting modes, juggling forms and shuffling styles. The linguistic playfulness that animates his poems conceals neither their serious intent nor their underlying melancholy."---Troy Jollimore, Washington Post
"A sensory and exciting debut. . . . These inventive, lyrical, and well-crafted poems offer memorable insights at every turn." * Publishers Weekly *
"The collections energy is constant, and some of the poems most straightforward moments are the most affecting. . . . A sharp, playful, and thoughtful work for poetry lovers." * Library Journal *
"These fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. . . . [Please make me pretty, I dont want to die] presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image." * The Rumpus *

Author Bio

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1997. He is the author of the chapbook Nearness, and his poems have appeared in many publications, including the Paris Review, Brittle Paper, and Lolwe. He lives in New York City.