WILDPLASSEN

Dove / Chris Kirubi's WILDPLASSEN is a finely-wrought debut collection. The weather surrounds, as subjectivity is carefully interrogated through typographic gesture and image. Thinking with Sembene, Glissant, Nourbese Philip and others, we are ushered into a space of translation and study reflecting on dispossession, native informants and racial categorisation. "Wildplassen" is a legal term for public urination in which wildness is invoked as an inappropriate occupation of public (urban) space. This collection transfigures the borders of air, city and landscape; language, lyric and page with instability and waywardness.

WILDPLASSEN by Dove/Chris Kirubi is a wondrous book. The pages shake, an attribute of syntax that resembles brownian motion. Just as "colour bleeds right through", so does this: a capacity to "tremble" that's both somatic and formal, an improvised set of notations. In fact, kirubi extends the intergenre proposition of the collection itself to emanate "gliss.notes", fragments and lines "transcribed...while attempting to translate," a "flickering close-up of flowers", and so on. This is a stunning and moving work from the verges of poetry, performance and visual art. - Bhanu Kapil

After the rain, Chris Kirubi's WILDPLASSEN meets us in the street, as all the mundane elements of the day world begin to glisten: light diffracting in the damp sheen upon the tarmac, pavements, railings, rainbows appearing in puddles. This poetry encourages us to loiter, or to walk intentionally at the slowest pace in the opposite direction to what racial capitalism would want of us. Only then emerge the small intimacies that Kirubi is attuned to, in the correspondences between sounds, syllables, plants. Their writing forages a quiet philosophy for the page. Pirouettes of emotion --- from this everyday enchantment, to anxiety and grief --- "encourage the recovery of all dreams". Come, pluck up your velveteen ears from beneath your raincoat, and remember to wash your hands. - Nat Raha

For Fans of: Victoria Adukwei-Bulley, Dionne Brand, Momtaza Mehri