Description

WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2023

What does it mean to have ‘heritage’, and how do we perform or undo it?

In these daring and sonorous poems, Anaxagorou conducts a researched unpacking of two countries whose dividing lines of a colonial past are still visible and felt.

Uniquely engaged with the complexities of Cyprus and the diasporic experience, these poems map both an island’s public history alongside a person’s private reckoning. They offer a ferocious and uncompromising look towards the damaging historical structures that have led to now.

Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony’s gift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create a vivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.

Publisher Review

One of the most politically engaged poets of our time... Uncompromisingly inventive, Heritage Aesthetics taps into the discordant music of our time and stops us in our tracks -- Kit Fan, author of Diamond Hill An education in empathy and its limitations, the liminality and porousness of nations, histories, races and memory... This is poetry bordering on pure imagination, one that makes its own conditions for living in the now -- Sandeep Parmar