The Rinehart Frames
University of Nebraska Press, 2021
The poems in The Rinehart Frames seek to exhaust the labyrinths of ekphrasis. By juxtaposing the character of Rinehart from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man with the film 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami, the poems leap into secondary histories, spaces, and languages that encompass a collective yet varied consciousness of being.
Cheswayo Mphanza’s collection questions the boundaries of diaspora and narrative through a tethering of voices and forms that infringe on monolithic categorizations of Blackness and what can be intersected with it. The poems are riffs of an ongoing history and are ultimately their own labyrinths, which continue the conversations of the infinite possibilities of the imagination to dabble in, with, and out of history.
The inventiveness and elegance with which The Rinehart Frames weaves the imaginations of visual art, film, and literature in order to observe and absorb the experience of Blackness in the troubled past and unsettling present is nothing short of extraordinary. Cheswayo Mphanza has shaped a language attuned to race, violence, and the artist’s relentless search among the ruins for wisdom, truth, and beauty.
Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled EdenThe Rinehart Frames is one of the finest poetry debuts to appear in years. Virtuosic in voices and allusions; profound in its exploration of past and contemporary Black experience; expansive, from Zambia to the United States to those invisible spaces below and behind the world’s surfaces, in its range and concerns, The Rinehart Frames gathers poetry we badly need now, and will return to, as a touchstone, in the future.
John Keene, author of Counternarratives