Hanif Abduraqqib. Sarah Kay. Elizabeth Acevedo. Clint Smith. Do any of these names sound familiar? How about Amanda Gorman? All of these writers are part of America’s thriving contemporary poetry ...
Then there are poems written in the voice of Baartman herself: a mix of Khoekhoe dialect words and euphonic, often musical, phrasing. This wide-ranging method has, almost necessarily, mixed results.