Vakunta: Honor Among Thieves

In this book of poems, the poet speaks in a confident tone of apocalyptic utterances: advising, warning, denouncing, protesting, and lamenting. This long poem has the twin virtues of relevance and clarity of diction. The poet willfully eschews the irksome ineloquence and syntactic sophistry characteristic of traditional poetry. He adopts the tone of African Guardians of the Word, the griots. Passi...