Books by Ladan Osman

Seven New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook boxed set

by Warsan Shire, Len Verwey, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Tjawangwa Dema, Clifton Gachagua, Nick Makoha, Ladan Osman

This eight-piece boxed set, an African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) project, features the work of seven African poets, with an introduction by Kwame Dawes, APBF series editor, and Chris Abani.

The boxed set is an annual project starting in 2014 to ensure the publication of seven chapbooks by African poets through participating publishers. Publication is made possible through Slapering Hol Press, in association with APBF and the literary journal Prairie Schooner, with support from The Poetry Foundation.
The chapbook contains:
• Mandible by TJ Dema
• The Cartographer of Water by Clifton Gachagua
• Carnaval by Tsitsi Jaji
• The Second Republic by Nick Makoha
• Ordinary Heaven by Ladan Osman
• Our Men Do Not Belong To Us by Wasan Shire
• Otherwise Everything Goes On by Len Verwey

The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony (African Poetry Book)

by Ladan Osman

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.

Allies

by Evie Shockley, Ed Pavlic, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ladan Osman

Original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism explore issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal, both political and private.

How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own?

These are difficult question to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from both established writers and newcomers, Allies offers unique insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances—be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)—Allies will be essential reading for our times.

Allies is the first publication of Boston Review's newly inaugurated Arts in Society department. A radical revisioning of the magazine's poetry and fiction, the department unites them—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a project that explores how the arts can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our age, from growing inequality to racial and gender regimes, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.

Fiction

Samuel Delay, Tananarive Due, Catherine Taylor

Poetry 

Jane Miller, Ru Puro, Emilia Nielsen, Sarah Vap, Rachel Levitsky, Tess Liem

Interviews

Walter Johnson and Tef Poe, Robin D. G. Kelley and Vijay Iyer 

Essays

Roderick Ferguson, Micki McEyla, Mark Nowak, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Abdullah Taïa