“In Sadia Hassan’s Enumeration, we are introduced to a visceral and skillful poet concerned with the way black life is understood across geographies. Hassan’s language develops into a tender and nuanced look at the intersections of location and lives, layered by movement both political and physical. Like the enumeration alluded to in her title poem, the poems collected here keep count of the litanies of memory, the tolls taken on the bodies of women, and the border crossings that come one after another until finally somewhere can be called “home.”
– Mathew Shenoda, Preface
“I will not be so bold as to make claims about directions and thematic trends in African poetry today because, after all, I come to this introduction not as someone who has attempted a deep scientific survey, but rather someone who, for the past decade, has been privileged to read a great deal of poetry written by emerging poets from Africa.
In reading this year’s iteration of the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set, I kept being drawn back to the idea of border crossings, of movement, and, in many instances, of migration. Many other common threads of form and content emerge in this work, but I thought it would be fruitful to consider this core notion of movement—a phenomenon that Toni Morrison, in her long essay The Origin of Others (2017), declared to be the most dominant theme of the twenty-first century. These African poets are confirming this.
– Kwame Dawes, Introduction
Sadia Hassan 