Clifton Gachagua’s Madman at Kilifi Reviewed at Wawa

2013 Sillerman Prize Winner Clifton Gachagua’s prize-winning book, Madman at Kilifi, was recently reviewed at the Wawa Book Review by Dami Ajayi, author of Clinical Blues. Ajayi acknowledges the difficulty African poets often have publishing full-length books and praises the APBF as a force for bringing these works to the public in a meaningful way.

Praising the book and recognizing that “[t]he attendant question is how we can stem the influences of America so as not to distort our realities as Africans,” Ajayi is fascinated by the madman at the center of the poems. There is a complication to this “apathy” at the center of the book, he asserts, and instead of dragging the reader down, he found that “questions on the intersections of the place of the poet as society’s mouthpiece and the compulsions of a self-obsessed diarist still nag on an umpteenth reading of this hugely successful first collection of a poet we are sure to hear from for a long time.”

Read the full review here.