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Poems
by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
A black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of "quiet" in producing forms of community, resistance, and love.
How does one encounter meaning amid so many kinds of noise? What is quiet when it isn't silence? Where does quiet exist—and what liberating potential might it hold? These poems dwell on ideas of black interiority, intimacy, and selfhood, and they celebrate as fiercely as they mourn. With a metaphysical edge and a formal restlessness attuned to both the sonics and the inadequacies of language, Quiet navigates the tension between the impulse to guard one's inner life and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, "your silence will not protect you."
"This debut poetry collection is abundant with thoughtful storytelling. Each poem is ruminative and distills the intimacies of Black girl/womanhood with fascinating
images, compelling observations and a nomadic sense of questioning, while honouring the concept of silence and the ways it plays out in one's interior life. These
delicate poems unpick encounters with loved ones, friends and animals (there's a beautiful poem about snails) and also focus firmly on the wider world, with poems such as 'Pandemic vs Black Folk' written with the sharpest of tongues." - The Guardian
"Clever and capacious poems ... Bulley invites us in as she turns everything – intimate and secret, precious and precarious – inside out... Bulley's collection may begin quietly, but by the end her voice is clearly heard." - Times Literary Supplement
"[A] standout debut ... This is an exploration of race, empire, friendship, nature and community written with an assured combination of critical originality and formal skill that is rare in first collections." - Irish Times
"Victoria Adukwei Bulley's stunning poems draw you in with their melodious versatility, intellect and dexterity; perfectly embody the political through the personal; and are freedom-loving shapeshifters constantly changing form and animating ideas and language to surprising effect. This is her debut collection, but she arrives fully formed." - Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other
"In Quiet, Victoria Adukwei Bulley advances a poetics of balance. The poems collected in these pages mix a technically assured, sonically resonant surface with a profoundly evocative, scrupulously integrated core. This book is a seismic event; its vibrations will be felt for a long time to come." - Kayo Chingonyi, author of A Blood Condition
"I've been waiting for this book for years and Victoria Adukwei Bulley's Quiet does not disappoint. There is so much to celebrate, so much to live for. Adukwei Bulley's poems find new ways to look outwards by looking inwards in a range of lyric modes and volumes. They are quietly articulated prayers of the searching, missing and surviving as well as poems full of loud joyful living. These highly complex and accomplished poems keep moving themselves (and us, the readers), towards a feeling of aliveness in that rare way that feels earned and fought for." - Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize
"In this shapeful text — both mysterious and crystalline — Victoria Adukwei Bulley writes a language of listening steeped in Black feminist thought and personal history. Quiet is sculptural, shiftful. It flourishes with stunning attention." - Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
This information about Quiet was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, a writer, and an artist. An alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, she has held residencies in the United States and Brazil, and in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is the recipient of a Techne scholarship for doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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