Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Collected Poems, 1998–2020

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the first major poet out of Africa's oldest republic of Liberia since the nation's founding and remains one of the most important poets from Africa. Spanning two decades of work, the poems in this collection tell stories of Wesley's homeland that would have otherwise been forgotten. As she recounts her life as a refugee, mother, wife, and African woman, Wesley also remembers the Liberians who were killed in the fourteen-year civil war, the hundreds of thousands silenced and unable to tell their own stories. In conversation with Africa and her new homeland of America, Wesley's craft is imbued with Grebo oral tradition, bringing her language alive as she makes the reader cry out in anger or laughter. On one page you may find reason to mourn the brutality of war, and on the next, a reason to laugh about the beauty of family or at the small wonders of everyday life. Poetry, to Wesley, is not about words; it is about the story, the story of the living seeking to give new life to both the living and those she calls the dead living.