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Quiet
- Poems
- Narrated by: Victoria Adukwei Bulley
- Length: 1 hr and 34 mins
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Quiet
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Publisher's Summary
A black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of “quiet” in producing forms of community, resistance, and love.
“Bulley’s stunning poems draw you in with their melodious versatility, intellect and dexterity; [they] perfectly embody the political through the personal.”—Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other
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."
What the critics say
WINNER OF THE POLLARD INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE
“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
“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