advance praise for children of small places

“There is both passion and beauty in these robust poems situated in Zambia and attentive to its legacies of colonialism and cultural displacement. Mubanga Kalimamukwento writes about the difficult work of remembering. children of small places is an astounding reworking of the past, with branches calling on the present not to forget the beginning. With fresh narrative language and interior strength, voices are given to mothers, daughters, ancestors, rivers; perfectly deployed with wonder and complete astonishment to do the ethical uncovering of things. This is a gorgeous book.” – Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, author of The Naming

“In the beginning, our poet writes, we insist on an origin story. And so we readers begin, in Zambia, in 1964, and travel through a dense, beautifully written history of a country. We conclude this part of the collection in 2024, a traumatized birth of a nation working to free itself from colonization, to be free of those who used their prayer books to bury our gods, to discard the name they gave a country, aiming for clean redemption as the years went by.  And then, in a way, our poet asks us to begin again, inside a family, inside deep familial trauma and abuse, inside love, and deep loss,  takes us through generational trauma made vivid through fragments of language, and we feel the trauma of big history measured against this family, political torment, family torment. The poet keeps us caught as she was caught. She does escape, but learns that not all dreams are butterflies/some are a foot on the neck/a shaking waking/meaning your father's voice finds wings inside the night. In the final pages of this dense and compelling collection, we read the truth-telling abecedarian, a brilliant use of a received form which takes us through the complicated alphabet narrative our author has lived, from A of alien/African through Z for Z Visa, Zambezi, Zambia where we began.  Her American life begins, beloved children let go of their original language, and though homesickness swamps her, she stays, while her city in Zambia stands witness.  Read this exceptional book. ” – Deborah Keenan,  author of from tiger to prayer

“An astonishing collection, and unabashedly enchanting. children of small places is a cascade where juvenescence wounds are unsettled and tended, a terrain where the daughter of the postcolony negotiates with the country with all deserved vituperations.  Mubanga painfully reminds us of a country grappling with vicissitudes of identity and sovereignty. Even so, Mubanga’s work is a filial threshold, brewed with bildungsroman poetics of a daughter in rhythmic harmony with the father, yet without hesitation of a lash against patriarchal hegemony. At once, the virago also comes to terms with the reality of motherhood, mothering, and variables of maternal pedagogy. Mubanga is adept and meticulous, commanding metaphor at will in sublime language and an assured tone. This is an illumination.” –Jide Salawu, author of Contraband Bodies.

“Traveling from Lusaka to Minnesota and back again, children of small places is a reckoning and a reminiscence—a chronicling of “this making & unspooling of self / conjoined with heartbreak,” and a vertiginous song of the choices made for us and the choices we make for ourselves. Nothing small about it, it is a collection steeped in life—and one I’ll be returning to for years to come.” –Bobby Elliot, author of The Same Man.