Description: Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility.Brief description:
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of five collections of poetry, including When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, and Becoming Ebony. She lives in Altoona, PA.
Review Quotes: "Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love..." --Independent Book Review
"These are affirming poems--songs, truly." --Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions"Her poems urge me to know these histories, not just the fragments which may flicker among headlines, especially now, with so many of the African diaspora as our neighbors, fellow churchgoers and poets, who, as Wesley's poems remind us, also bear the weight of unhealed racial wounds in the United States." --Kathleen O'Toole, Presence
"In Praise Song for My Children, we encounter a poet at the height of her skills and at the height of her clarity about the world and what things must be spoken into it. But we are blessed to be given an insight into how she arrives at this place of power--it is a remarkable selection of some of the most urgent poems to emerge out of the wars of Liberia. Here is work of incredible joy, deepest lamentation, and necessary hope. It is a sure testament." --Kwame Dawes, author of City of Bones
"Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's poems resound as the seasoned voice of one of Africa's most consequential poets, and an expert navigator of the Liberian diaspora's sojourns in the United States. Praise Song for My Children displays her poetic poise in marshalling deep empathy, keen attention, and courage, unmasking the rawest losses of the war that tore her home asunder. These poems do not flinch at grief, mother-love, survivor's anguish, and victory over the body's betrayals." --Tsitsi Jaji, author of Beating the Graves