When the Wanderers Come Home

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University–Altoona. She has four other books of poetry, including Where the Road Turns and Becoming Ebony, part of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry.

• Acknowledgments    Book I. Coming HomeSo I Stand Here    What Took Us to War    Erecting Stones: January 2013    Looters of War 2011    Coming Home: A Poem for MT    Send Me Some Black Clothes    I Need Two Bodies    The Creation    And You Tell Me This Is a Funeral?     Loss    If You Have Never Been Married    Becoming Ghost    The Killed Ones    The Cities We Lost    A City of Ghosts    July Rain    I Go Home    Song for Mariam Makeba    When Monrovia Rises    This Is the Real Leaving    Book II. Colliding WorldsIn My Dream    Sometimes, I Close My Eyes    Sandy: Love Song for the Hurricane Woman    Tsunami: A Song for an Unknown Young Man    For My Children, Growing Up in America    You Wouldn’t Let Me Adopt My Dog: A Poem for Ade-Juah    When I Grow Up    The Inequality of Dogs    Medellin from My Hotel Room Balcony    Morocco, on the Way to London    To Libya: February 2011    Sometimes I Wonder    The Deer on My Lawn    Leaves Are Leaving Us Again    Book III. World (Un)/BreakableI Want to Be the Woman    This Morning    When I Was a Girl    I’m Afraid of Emptiness    Silence    I Want Everything    Finally, the Allergist    I Dreamed    On the Midnight Train    First Class    This Is Facebook    A Room with a View    Braiding Hair    Losing Hair    Hair    2014, My Mamma Never Knew You

“Wesley is a poet working to find language that can help show the fractures and fissures of a postwar nation and the personal realities of displacement and return. . . . [Wesley] uses the framing set by the generations before her to create poetry that not only speaks to her realities as a Liberian woman and survivor of the civil war but a poetry that implicates her own grief, allowing her a fully humanized space on par with the works of anglophone writers from all over the world. In this vein Wesley, representative of a kind of ‘middle generation’ between Aidoo and the emerging writers of today, helps break ground for a myriad of both content and style.”-Matthew Shenoda, World Literature Today  “In Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s powerful When the Wanderers Come Home, the search for a place of arrival, self-recognition, and remembrance continues. . . . Despite the brokenness of what she describes, Wesley’s poetic form is smooth and steady, the neat stanzas and non-rhyming couplets capably containing the most shocking revelations. . . . Wesley pays particular tribute to women’s strength and resilience.”-Bidisha, Poetry Review