AFRICANAMERICAN'T, by Ayokunle Falomo, finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters
If the question is America—and by extension, who is and what does it mean to be American? —AFRICANAMERICAN’T offers no answers. The CAN’T in the title suggests impossibility and that is precisely what the book is interested in. Even in the so-called land of opportunity, some things remain impossible for its speaker(s). In a way, AFRICANAMERICAN’T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country. However valid despair might be as a response to the continued failings of his two countries, Ayokunle Falomo traverses the distance between betrayal and love in an attempt to find poetry—and perhaps, something like hope—in all the places it can’t be found.
AYOKUNLE FALOMO is Nigerian, American, and the author of AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published in print and online: The New York Times, Houston Public Media, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, New England Review, Write About Now among others. You can find more information about him at afalomo.com.