During which time, blacking out, the sky spits
a cob-full of molars, shakes and blusters

with light, and shaking off blackets or whores the uncoffeed
decend each old white-washed splinter-wood space

through the gossip and hum of the air, in whose space
belongs the sounds of everyone: he,

the enterer, she, the forlorn, you
the strictly unperturbed, me, the freshly undone.

'Dar Es Salaam'

Afrika! is an imaginary space, a 'k' and an exclamation mark away from the processes, histories and conflicts that this, Adam Schwartzman's second collection, takes for its subject. It is a space that is at once estranging and, with its wily appropriations, home ground for the citizen of the English language. Above all, in projecting 'the great out-there' into one fictive universe, Afrika! eschews personality and vigorously re-affirms community of descent, inheritance and association -- as the source of authority, both poetic and political.