Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems

Who are the Women of Xolobeni?

Who was Dulcie September?

What are dirty/pretty things?

Or vulva volcanoes?

 

Whatever its theme, each poem in Wild Imperfections reflects the lives of most, if not all women, womyn and womxn – particularly those born Black and poor by design, in a post-slavery, post-colonial world. These poems resist ‘fitting in’ and redefine what it means to be wild and imperfect.

 

Bold and powerful, this collection features the work of forty Black women poets from Africa and its diaspora. Wild Imperfections opens with poems honouring different generations of ancestor women, like Sarah Baartman and Rosa Parks – born at different timelines yet cultural and political mirrors to Black girls and women across the Black world, across generations. Questioning and disrupting patriarchy, these poems speak about birth and death, fertility and infertility, rape and genital mutilation, war, exile and forced migration, but also revel in joy, desire, and the expression of sexuality and the erotic. But what is a wild imperfection? And can the language of these poets (re)create, reshape a space for the ‘wild’ and ‘unruly’, the ‘loose’ and ‘dirty’, the ‘witches’ and ‘bitches’ who are perfect in their brokenness and who are no longer seeking permission for their rage, their joy and their healing?

 

‘Puts Black women where we know we belong, not at the margins of other people’s art … but at the helm of our own creative practice’

– Bernardine Evaristo