Books
When the Fires Go Down
In When the Fires Go Down, Lesego Rampolokeng writes in the tense after the blaze: the hour of smoke, residue, reckoning, and the dangerous darkness that follows. The title itself carries both foreboding and aftermath—what happens when the flames drop, and what still burns underneath. Across these acute, fiery, unflinching litanies, Rampolokeng brings a relentless gaze to body, history, language, and nation, moving with precision, urgency, and a ferocious musical intelligence. The poems surge from dense, jazz-charged freedom sonics and black radical invocation into historical re-enactment, social-media derangement and repurposing, and hard street-level tribute— to Orlando West, its wounds, its styles, its unfinished struggles, a microcosm of what’s been, what is and what’s to come.
Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, this is a book of conjuring and confrontation: incantatory, improvisatory, and alive with ecstatic wordplay, where high theory and low vernacular collide, where freedom is sung and interrogated, where memory returns as rhythm, scar, and prophecy. Here, Rampolokeng writes from both sides of the tracks at once—A-side and B-side, inside and outside—holding us in that crux until the mirror cracks and history speaks back.
“If there was any doubt about Lesego Rampolokeng’s important place in the literary history and trajectory of this country, the prophetic power and poetic pyrotechnics of his latest offering should be enough to suffocate such spirit of uncertainty for good.
— Unathi Slasha, author of the novels, Jah Hills and The Hollow Sound of Lightweight Bodies.
Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet and performer, the author since 1990 of 14 books, including eight books of poetry, a playscript, and four novels. He has collaborated with visual artists, playwrights, filmmakers, theatre and opera producers, poets and musicians. His no-holds-barred style, radical-political aesthetic and instantly recognisable voice have brought him a unique place in South African literature.
Rampolokeng won the NIHSS award for his poetry collection a half century thing, and the UJ fiction prize for his novel Bird-Monk Seding. He has performed his poetry in several countries in Europe, as well as in the USA, Colombia and Brazil, and has shared the stage with poets Linton Kwesi Johnson, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Jean 'Binta' Breeze and Mutabaruka.
musicians.
An Archaeology of Holes
An Archaeology of Holes is an excavation and an evisceration of love, loneliness, alienation and what it means to be human. Working between fabulism, dark realism and autofiction, these stories propose the creative and liberatory possibilities of holes, which are everywhere: in bodies, in the ransacked earth, in erased lives and memories, in forgotten loves and lovers and the endless massacres. First published in French translation by Ròt-Bò-Krik (2022)*, then by Bridge Books in Chicago (2024)**, this South African edition brings what the Chicago Review of Book calls Hardy’s “uneasy, uncomfortable, and utterly unmissable” prose home***.
"Through lenses both forensic and fantastic, Hardy holds up to her strange light the human body and the body politic. For fans of writers like Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Rikki Ducornet, Kathryn Davis, or Carmen Maria Machado, for fans of crossing the veil to slip off their skin and dancing around in their bones, of picking through their own trash, of rediscovering themselves after despair, heartbreak, and loneliness, Archaeology of Holes is a most perfect companion."
— Danielle Pafunda, author of Along the Road Everyone Must Travel, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.
"From bullet holes to black holes, from mouth holes to safe holes to buildings with holes in their centers, Stacy Hardy's writing blasts its way from absence into vital and unforgettable presence. When the extreme violence of misogyny and racialized capitalism becomes a normal part of our life and landscape, it is art and great writing that helps us see both our damage and our potential escape routes. Archaeology of Holes is a collection that will stay with me for a very long time."
— Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award.
Stacy Hardy is a writer, researcher, and editor whose work explores the intersections of embodiment, the individual, and society. She is the author of the short fiction collections Because the Night (Pocko, 2015) and An Archaeology of Holes (Rot-Bo-Krik, Paris 2022; Bridge Books, Chicago, 2023), and co-author of The Breathers with Daniel Borzutzky. Her critically acclaimed plays and award-winning librettos have been performed globally at venues and festivals such as the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France and the Royal Opera House in London. Hardy is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Wits University, and an editor at the Pan-African platform Chimurenga.
* https://www.rot-bo-krik.com/catalogue
**https://www.bridge-chicago.org/bridge-books-1/archaeology-of-holes
***https://chireviewofbooks.com/2023/12/08/excavating-the-unconscious-in-an-archaeology-of-holes/
An Archaeology of Holes
greyheart
"Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost" Albert Ayler
At once poetry and an ars poetica, a novel and its undoing, songlike and shattered, greyheart attacks language's fissures to explode its most enigmatic dualisms: the sublime and the monstrous, love and hate, freedom and enslavement, black and white.
The third and final part of his cardiac arresting prose trilogy, greyheart is also the most blooadsoaked and heartfelt. As Rampolokeng says it: "greyheart is no novel, poetry/short story collection/ anything like that. it is my manifesto (my ultimate statement to the world. nobody has to 'like' it. in it i 'speak' my being."
Born in Orlando West, Soweto, in Johannesburg, Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and writing teacher. He is the author of several pioneering collections of poetry including Talking Rain (1993), The Bavino Sermons (1999), Head on Fire (2012) and A Half Century Thing (2015). He is also the author of four novels, several plays, screenplays and has collaborated on albums, performances and recordings with several musicians.
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Jah Hills
A Novel
Jah Hills is alone in the Kwafindoda bush, waiting for the elders to come, burn ibhuma and deliver him home when he is tricked, captured and turned into isithunzela. A creature trapped in a wardrobe by day and only freed at night, to move between the realm of the living and the dead. One night, he narrowly escapes and finds his way back. But home is no longer home...
Set between Kwafindoda, where the nature is alive and ghosts exist even before someone is dead, and South Africa's gritty urban townships, Jah Hills explores the conflict between life and death, folklore and philosophy, so as to write the Unlanguaged World of today. A breathless journey, at once fevered and visionary, it invites the reader to find wilderness and brutality in the banal, the beautiful in the bizarre and to seek answers, not in the sum, but in the derangement of its many seething parts.
Unathi Slasha is a writer from Despatch, Khayamnandi. He is the author of the novella Jah Hills and the chapbook Much with the Dead & Mum with the Dying, or: Rigidities of Rationalism, Camaraderie Criticism & Contemporary South African Literature. His work has been published in several South African and international literary journals. His work is an attempt to reimagine and subvert Nguni folklore to write what he coined as The Unlanguaged World.
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A Half Century Thing
Essays
Published in 2015, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday and a quarter of a century after his debut Horns for Hondo (1990), Lesego Rampolokeng's A Half Century Thing is a devoted heresy, a sermon on the word, on politics and aesthetics that challenges what poetry does, what it can do, even what it is willing to address as a form.
"Lesego Rampolokeng’s latest collection reveals a poet who is adept at harsh, harrowing imagery and flights of sonic beauty." Gwen Ansell
Born in Orlando West, Soweto, in Johannesburg, Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker and writing teacher. He is the author of several pioneering collections of poetry including Talking Rain (1993), The Bavino Sermons (1999), Head on Fire (2012) and A Half Century Thing (2015). He is also the author of four novels, several plays, screenplays and has collaborated on albums, performances and recordings with several musicians.
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