Refractive Africa

Will Alexander's Refractive Africa is a diasporic invocation of world-historical and cosmological dimensions. Lumumba. Tutuola. Rabearivelo. Each long poem swelters, pulling a dense constellation of national heroes, ruptured worlds, hauntings, and sensory frequencies into its orbit. Through a glissade of luminous dexterity and precision, Alexander maps out a lexical cartography of Africas, real and imagined, lost and recovered. -- Momtaza Mehri
Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines. Here, three long poems evoke colonial Africa * New York Times *
Will Alexander's Refractive Africa crackles with the assurance of a worldview that eschews the studs of "foreign domination'. Referencing African icons, ideologies and injuries, Alexander draws us into a feast of definition and redefinition, with a revelry in language, "alive with ferocious embellishment" -- Nii Ayikwei Parkes
There is likely no poetry more propulsive, visually kinetic, and intricately layered than that composed by Will Alexander... an imaginative realm that is entirely unlike any other, one in which we are immersed in sheer, coruscating energy -- Albert Mobilio * Hyperallergic *
This visionary act of "transpersonal witness" to a continent is an Afromodernist epic in the tradition of Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants... An incantation against "Eurocentric stultification", Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation * Guardian *
...powerful and visionary...The collection sings from the page; it celebrates, it prophecises, and it revels in the great spirits of Africa's national heroes and literary giants. Alexander's writing is awash with innovation, ably straddling a world which is all too familiar, and a sparkling one of imagination... Refractive Africa is a bold and dazzling culmination of his contemporary thinking, and is an astonishing leap into the UK market * The Skinny *
A powerful meditation on the colonial ravagings of the continent and the modern quest for resources that continues to tax its wilderness... An electrifying display of narrative power through chiselled poetic lines. * Happy Mag *
Alexander's diegesis is one of chimerical fission and transformation... Everything is volatile and alchemical here ... Displaying great lexical elasticity and riverine agility, he choreographs a masterful 'ballet of the forgotten' ('The Congo'), revealing a lexical cartography of incorruptible reclamation * Poetry Review *