Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems

The debut collection of Tawanda Mulalu's poetry explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy, combining a confessional voice with offbeat imagery and a mixture of seriousness and humor. It probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of being a diasporic Black African in White America, and his admiration for canonical poets. The collection presents a poetic world that is both familiar and jarring, where history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image.

Format: Hardback
Length: 104 pages
Publication date: 13 September 2022
Publisher: Princeton University Press

The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry, "Please make me pretty, I don't want to die," delves into the realms of tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Spanning the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu seamlessly blend an inviting confessional voice with offbeat imagery, offering a captivating blend of seriousness and humor.

The speaker of these poems explores romantic and interracial intimacy, the peculiarity and challenges of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teaching assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, particularly Sylvia Plath. By juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, including prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world that is both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country."

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691239026