American Mercy by Afua Ansong

$14.99

 

Afua Ansong’s rich and penetrating poems in her chapbook, “American Mercy” evoke our troubled times and the immigrant’s dilemma with its contradictions.  Leaving behind her home and country obstacles for many, form this poet.

And no one understands

What leaving a mother

did for her language.

 

Her courage to confront her own attitudes towards blackness, God, the Bronx act as both subtext and subject. Biblical characters and immigrants inhabit the poems inviting us to question our assumptions of borders, countries and God.

Show me who gets a passport

for naming a country.

 

Her poems deftly question home and our capacity to define it

I am born twice, first in retrospect and second

into the arms of defiance.

 

This startling first collection with its evocative language and astute observations act as both oracle and call to action for our troubled times.

–Michelle Yasmine Valladares,  Poet and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The City College of New York, CUNY

 

It is a distinctly American mercy to read Afua Ansong’s urgent, intimate poems on such sweeping issues as the immigration debate, our insistence on sorting human beings into racial categories, our class divides, broken families, and sexual politics. These poems dwell at the borders of identity and the limits of language, questioning as often as they answer. “Who owns the word illegal?” asks one poem. “What is normal?” asks another.  “Am I here again to save?” asks yet another. I’ll give a full-throated “Yes and amen” to that last question. As for normal, American Mercy is anything but. Call it original. Call it extraordinary. Call it a wondrous prayer of moral clarity, oracular language, understated humor, Ghanaian heritage, and a gift for the illuminating question.

–Julie Sheehan, Poet & Associate Professor of the MFA Program at Stony Brook Southampton

 

 

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Description

American Mercy

by Afua Ansong

$14.99, paper

978-1-63534-868-2

2019

Afua Ansong is a Ghanaian-American writer, dancer, and photographer. Her work interrogates the challenges of the African immigrant in the United States, exploring themes of transition, citizenship, and identity. She is currently working on a mixed genre project that explores 60 Adinkra symbols believed to have been created by a captured king, Gyaman Adinkra. The first of these poems has been published at JoINT and four more are forthcoming in the Kalahari Review.  Her work has been published or will appear in Prairie Schooner, Frontier, Newfound and other publications.

 

 

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