Will Alexander

“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.

In Will Alexander’s work, “Every poem reads like a subversive, alchemical wonder. He is truly a singular voice” (Jackson Poetry Prize citation). Inspired by Cioran’s aphorisms and composed over the span of thirty years, Across the Vapour Gulf opens with a note by the poet: “Reading Cioran opened an unexpected neural pathway, opening the way for the composition of the compilation at hand. Each entry was instantaneous. They welled up and appeared with such astonishing alacrity, that they seemed to compose themselves practically fully formed.”

In navigation a loxodrome, or rhumb line, is a line that crosses all meridians at the same angle, maintaining a constant compass direction, a path of constant bearing. The Sri Lankan Loxodrome threads this theme through a series of ecstatic monologues filled with the poet’s vast imaginary and intellectual wanderings, and touched by the sufferings of his ongoing battle with cancer. The book culminates in the title poem, which follows a lone Sri Lankan sailor who beheads sea snakes as an ongoing meditation while sailing the expanse of the Indian Ocean. Along the way the traveler meets various African communities as he journeys eastward from Madagascar to Sri Lanka. In lush, mesmeric language filled with the spirit of Aimé Césaire and Sun Ra, Will Alexander maps an epic voyage unlike any other in contemporary American poetry.