Magnitude

Description

SYNOPSIS

Working with a rich, explicit and often musical intertextuality, this collection examines the challenges of both diaspora and displacement. The experience of a mother’s illness and death, and the packing-up of a family home in Harare, become the impetus to explore childhood memories and the adult child’s self-reckoning, raising questions of the earthly and the spiritual, the human and the animal, and the existential unhousing and self-homing of queerness. The poetry makes connections of magnitude beyond the immediate subject of one particular Zimbabwean family and its place in a complex familial and national history, interrogating wider issues of home and belonging, and particularly the experience of migrants who have fled unliveable homes only to be refused human kinship in their host countries.

ENDORSEMENT

“This is poetry that brings a tear to the eye and wipes it away with the driest of wit. A mature debut by a gifted author.”

– Nathan Trantraal

BIOGRAPHY

Deborah Seddon was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, emigrating to South Africa where she now lives and works. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. Deborah holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and a PhD in English from Cambridge University. During her career as an academic, she has contributed essays, book chapters, articles, and reviews to a wide variety of academic publications. Her poetry has been published in various journals, both locally and abroad, including Ons Klyntji, Botsotso, New Contrast, the Sol Plaatje European Union Anthology, the AvBob Poetry Project, the Badilisha Poetry X-Change Archive of Pan-African poets, the Gerald Kraak Anthology, and Sinister Wisdom. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award and the New Contrast National Poetry Prize. Magnitude is her debut poetry collection.