In a Language That You Know

Len Verwey is a South African poet. He was born in Mozambique in 1973. His chapbook Otherwise Everything Goes On is included in the boxed set Seven New Generation African Poets, and his poems have been published in various journals including New Coin and New Contrast.

• Coast    My Mother Speaks    Fishing Boy    Fathers to Sons    Bitter Boys    El Bandito de los Nadas    The Quarry    Old Joke    The Bills    The Real Evidence    Campaign    Experts    The Stowaway    Our Leader Speaks    Elsewhere    Leaving    Confession of the Stable Hand    I Flew Secretly    Maputo    An Unchained Dog for Each of You    See Them    A Thing of Theirs    Ecstasy Revolver    Sunnyside    Antarctica    1999    Mourning for Beginners    Self-Portrait as a Father    Stone    With the Music Teacher    Rehearsal Notes    Jonah    In a Language That You Know    Doctor    Simple    Acknowledgments    Notes

“Contemplative and lyrical. . . . ‘When I cannot find you / I give your name to everything.’ Such poems employ the periphery as an active, sometimes disquieting space from which to imagine. Such poems disarm me into sorrow, into hope.”-Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria and Kingdom Animalia“Poems in this book plunge you, without warning, from a mattress on the floor, a village bus stop, or a fishermen’s boat into the depth of human aloneness. . . . Len Verwey writes: ‘You need to breathe / in stone, breathe out a flower.’ He accomplishes this mission in his book: breathing in history and landscape, he breathes out powerful, fervent lyricism.”-Valzhyna Mort, author of Collected Body and Factory of Tears: A Lannan Literary Selection