STRAY, foreword by Kwame Dawes

77pp., paperback, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2018

ISBN: 9781496205582

Poems

“Bernard Farai Matambo casts images that quiver with terror and desire. These images root within us as if we were the very landscape the poet renders spectral with the residue of human passions: cities of ruined arches and potshards underfoot, the human cost of conflict, populations bowed in reverence and fear. Matambo is an archer of lyric poetry. His words are ‘drawn out and taut, anxious as catapults.’” Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest

“Bernard Farai Matambo debuts a collection that’s lush, yet urgent, determined to design a language that can feed the hunger for truth. The poems are filled with strays: people who have chosen the solitude and danger of separation - or had it thrust upon them. Though they gesture and reach toward some sense of belonging that blood, race, proximity, or shared experience might seem to guarantee, these wanderers are never more alone than when they are with each other.” Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic

Bernard Farai Matambo was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He was Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Stray, his debut collection, won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.