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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