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“You will know this thing when you see it,” the Boatman tells Connie, “and you must be finished by half past six.” As she floats above her hometown of Scheepersdorp, Constance West can’t tell how long it’s been since she died. Nor why the mysterious Boatman rowed her back here. Beneath her, all the people she loved appear to be thriving. But the house of her guardian, the town dentist and former mayor, seems suspiciously quiet. And then there is Marianne, the baby daughter she had to leave behind. In Beverly Rycroft’s beautifully crafted novel, a small South African town in 1995 forms the backdrop to Connie’s tale. With honesty, humour and tenderness, Connie unravels the stories of her loved ones, and allows a secret in her own past to emerge.
Beverly Rycroft was born in the Eastern Cape. She is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand. A qualified teacher, she taught for several years before turning to writing full-time. She has written articles for both local and international magazines and in 2000 was joint winner of the Femina/Sensa Features competition. Her poems have appeared in Carapace and New Coin, and are due to appear in the 2009 edition of Scrutiny 2. She lives in Cape Town with her family. Missing is her first collection of poems.
"In her second volume of poetry; A Private Audience, Beverly Rycroft navigates the 'echoing counterpoint' of womanhood. Painful family relationships, illness and death are some of the themes if this riveting collection written in sparse, electric verses. The 'voracious memory' is haunting in this commendable work." - JOAN HAMBIDGE
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The Only Magic We Know is a celebration of all the poets Modjaji has published. This anthology offers a taste of the range and diversity of the poems that have appeared in the individual poets collections.
“Crouched among the last surviving pieces of my life’s wreck, I seek a chemistry, some wizard’s formula which releases the wayward life from its grim history.” – Tony Ullyatt, ‘Like Icarus’
In this serious, often playful, sometimes outrageous volume, Murray draws inspiration from contemporary women’s experimental poetics. The collection recognises female writers’ equivocal relation to forms of the linguistic avant-garde such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and brings embodiment and affective voicing back into the provocative equation. Yet, this is not a simple return to lyric intimacy. Murray inflects poetry’s familiar inner speech with the sounds and shapes of found materials and engaging cultural noise. In Otherwise Occupied, the seamlessness of the beautiful, expressive poem becomes otherwise under the innovative necessity of the page as an open field of multiple (mis)takes and (mis)givings. Here, a poem is a space of enactment, a process of thinking-writing and performative exploration: idea ↔ body, lyric ↔ language, innovative necessity ↔ enduring convention. And in the end: there is no subject outside language.
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The Land of Too Much presents a simple but powerful hypothesis that addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention starting in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years? Although the United States is often considered a liberal, laissez-faire state, Monica Prasad marshals convincing evidence to the contrary. Indeed, she argues that a strong tradition of government intervention undermined the development of a European-style welfare state. The demand-side theory of comparative political eco...
In Transcontinental Delay, Simon Van Schalkwyk tracks experiences of imminent arrival and departure, periods of waiting and suspension between destinations, points where the demands of place dissolve into the more anticipatory potentialities of space. Drawing on geographical lexicons familiar to South African localities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg, the collection also captures fleeting encounters with global spaces as far afield as the United Kingdom, Argentina and Sweden. Considering the world from a position of "transcendental homelessness" rather than more conventional expressions of estrangement, alienation, or exile, the poems collected in Transcontinental Delay are attentive to a fundamental sense of unbelonging, registering the moods, tones and attitudes of the visitor and stranger: figures of restlessness and, at times, obscurity, at odds with both the settlements of "home" and the transitory compulsions of travel.