num_pages: 96
description: Tanella Boni is a major African poet and this book The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn is her first full collection to be translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africas Ivory Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these events onto a mythic topography where people live among their ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful who are at once magical and all too petty. The elementsthe sun the wind the waterare animated as independent forces beyond simile or metaphor. Words too are elemental and the poet is present in the landscapeduring these times / I searched for the letters / for the perfect word. Boni affirms her desire for hope in the face of ethnocultural and state violence although she acknowledges that desiring to hope and hoping are not the same. 
language: English
title: The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn
publisher: University of Nebraska Press