In Telepath, award-winning poet, Akua Lezli Hope offers poems reporting from those with the remains of the gift that we all once shared. Telepath wrestles with the promises, possibilities and constraints of this endowment.
This exploration sojourns beyond witness bearing to affirm, strengthen and enlighten.
Telepath examines realms of experience and understanding from the perspective of those who retain, accept and have integrated the mind skill of reading others thoughts with empathy. Through this speculative lens of alternative sight, an array of concerns are engaged. Akua Lezli Hope conjures the mythic from the ancient past, Middle Passage, 20th century American familial scenes, card playing college tournaments, urban transportation, commuting, low income life challenges, and resilience.
Telepath shape-shifts, occupying varying poetic forms, and personae, all possessing the unseen mind skill of hearing the unsaid, interrogating the realm of intention and patrolling possibilities of truth rendering, by using the speculative to navigate unfolding realities.
There is a wry and wistful nostalgia; sharp, poignant, recollections, and homages to a place-time where bonds of friendship and family mediated the world’s assaults. The poems inhabit an array of forms: from concrete to haibun to micro-acrostic to a sonnet crown.
Introspective and slyly subversive, the joyful agony of memories of times past and the challenging present are manifested in Telepath for edification and enchantment.
In TELEPATH, Akua Lezli Hope maps the electric meridians of the unspoken, tracing a "wordless knowing" that hums within the blood long before a phone rings or a mouth opens. There is a deep, startling intelligence in these poems, a clarity that looks straight into the eyes of the world and wins. With a quiet, vulnerable beauty, Hope's language acts as a solar flare in the mind's atmosphere, illuminating the ancestral oneness we nearly forgot. A stunning, visionary work.
With TELEPATH we see a grandmaster of speculative poetry firmly in her element, providing an excellent introduction to her technique and literary priorities that are at once compelling, personal and deeply imaginative. Each line and turn of phrase is fine-tuned to launch you across an epic trajectory of the outermost boundaries of language and perception, managing to look internally and externally at once. From pieces like "First Contact" and "My mother she ate me" to her closing poem "T-Stroll" Akua Lezli Hope adds a wonderful set of poems to the world sure to inspire and delight the curious reader.
Hope transmits a poetic philosophical explosion for the sixth sense. TELEPATH takes us on a trip from birth to the outer reaches of the cosmos to New York, and through dimensions only visible to those who look with the third eye. Hope's words are music transferred from mind to mind, so open up and receive.
In award-winning poet Akua Lezli Hope's speculative collection, TELEPATH, we are transported inside what it is to experience others' emotions, thoughts, as well as communication between telepaths. Akua's poems give a kaleidoscope of views on having an ability that can be used to gain and lose relationships, identity, money or to be a telepath enslaved who may not know the language being spoken, but has a deep knowing of the slaver's intention. We can imagine how it feels to know the difference between what is said and the truth inside a person. A variety of poetry forms gracefully move words on the page, carrying us through the challenges of a gift that can bring maddening loneliness or wonderful companionship. I was fascinated by the idea of us all being telepaths, once upon a time.
Meet the Author
A third generation New Yorker, firstborn, Akua Lezli Hope has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts. She’s won scholarships for the Hurston Wright writers’ program and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A Cave Canem fellow, she has been in print since 1974 with over 500 poems published.
Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry. Her poems, Montserrat and Awaiting Your Return (for Jamal Kashoggi) were nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her book, Them Gone, a finalist in the 2015 Word Works Washington Prize competition, was selected for Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Bryant Lysembee Editor’s Prize and published in 2018 by The Word Works. Her speculative poetry chapbook, Otherwheres, won the 2021 Elgin Award.
Her poem, They Are Swimmers, was nominated for a 2021 Best of the Net by Rising Mothers.Her poem, Metis Emits, won the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s short poem award for 2015. Her poem, Endangered, which won Rattle’s Poet’s Respond (2016) was used as text for Europe’s Duo Lied Competition’s song.
She is published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies including: Tales of the Reconvergence, Unioverse; Africa Rising; Black Fire This Time, Black Joy, Wreaths for a Wayfarer: An Anthology in Honour of Pius Adesanmi, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop, Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Dirty Blues, Star*Line, Scifaikuest, Panoply magazine, SoFi, Faerie Magazine, Iron Horse Review, Lockjaw Magazine, Penumbra, About Place Journal, Poets Reading the News, New Verse News, Scifaikuest, Starline, Eye to the Telescope, 50 over 50, Minerva Rising, Strange Horizons, Rattle, Breath and Shadow, The Crafty Poet II, The Cossack Review, Silver Blade, Tiny Text, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010); among many others.
She also creates sculpture, objects, and jewelry in glass, metal and handmade paper. She exhibits her art work regularly. She has published over 130 crochet patterns. Founder of a paratransit nonprofit, she plays the soprano saxophone, sings her favorite anime songs in Japanese, makes good manifest, and prays for the end of suffering for all sentience.
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