Sunday Poem: ‘English Literature’ by Adebe DeRango-Adem
ENGLISH LITERATURE (Adebe DeRango-Adem)
Why,
because chiaroscuro
is where I belong.
That and I was once Pushkin’s wife.
O my darling octoroon
your Russia is alive and well,
but your Ethiopia is still squinting into the sun
blind and full of light
trying to find empire in uptown Harlem
but all we get is
gentrification petrification talk
about holy war, race war, war on war
while the Church of Nazareth on 144th stands
a burned-out shell, waiting.
Adebe DeRango-Adem is an Ethiopian-Italian writer and doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in various North American sources, including Descant, CV2, Canadian Woman Studies and the Toronto Star. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate. In 2008, she attended the summer writing program at Naropa University, where she mentored with Anne Waldman and the late Amiri Baraka.
Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo (Frontenac House, 2010) was one of ten manuscripts chosen in honour of Frontenac House’s Dektet 2010 competition, using a blind selection process by a jury of leading Canadian writers: bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, and Alice Major. Ex Nihilo was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world’s largest prize for writers under thirty. She is also the co-editor, alongside Andrea Thompson, of Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications, 2010).
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Adebe-DA/109123712453111
He has shown that he can adjust his pronunciation from listening to my speaking in my class.
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