Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021

Including essays from the author published for the first time in print

‘I was blown away by this book’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO

The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy. In poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity.

Written on the author’s phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and ‘foolish machismo’ of hero culture from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram. Through the thick gauze of history, these breathtaking poems look the world square in the face and ask, ‘What the actual . . . ?’

‘Bristles with energy . . . Consistently vivid’ GUARDIAN

Publisher Review

This is what poetry looks like when you have nothing to lose, when you speak from the heart, when you have spent years honing your craft so that you can be free. This is what poetry looks like when you are a word-sorcerer, a linguistic swordsman, a metaphor-dazzler, a passionate creator of poetry as fire, as lament, as beauty, as reflection, as argument, as home. I was blown away by this book — BERNARDINE EVARISTO, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other Bristles with energy, reflecting how these poems were written, directly on to his phone in moments grabbed while travelling, between meetings, before sleeping, while sleeping . . . The square lyrics, prose-like in appearance, are consistently vivid, whether Ellams is taking on the biggest of subjects – Shakespeare, Trump, empire – or ruminating on quieter, more tender moments, especially on the endless failings of men — Rishi Dastidar * GUARDIAN * This first collection is a masterclass in subtlety: poems that manage to be tender, angry, vulnerable, sad, funny, yearning and interrogating of history, both recent and long ago, all at once. It’s a phenomenal piece of work about what it is to exist in this time, and his dissection of pop culture, colonialism, social interactions and the cruelty of the world, of men, of systems will be read and studied for years — NIKESH SHUKLA, editor of The Good Immigrant