Gestuary
Sylvie Kandé author Nancy Naomi Carlson translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Seagull Books London Ltd
Published:13th Feb '26
Should be back in stock very soon
A richly imagined, physically charged poetry collection in which history, myth, and protest are transformed into lyrical gestures.
Sylvie Kandé’s Gestuary offers a collection of gestures—of death and life, of tenderness and brutality—that fractures the flow of time. Senegalese riflemen from World War I are juxtaposed with migrants at borders who sew their lips shut in protest over immigration policies. In dream-like sequences, the dead refuse to stay underground and “push against the fence / that swings between our realm and theirs.” Inspired by unexpected sources, including jazz, sculpture, the legacy of the slave trade, proverbs, and elements of Diola culture, Kandé’s poems are rich in musicality and sophisticated syntax, rendered into a lyrical and luminous English by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
“Silent, sacred, roaming.”
* Ms. Magazine, on "The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026" *“The balancing lines of these poems are sinuous in their beckoning to places where you can swear under the ‘glabrous moon . . .you’d hear the sugarcane grow’ and are inhabited by a rich tapestry, drawing us deeply into Kandé’s histories and, ultimately, the human connectivity of love and loss we all share.”
* World Literature Today *“In these poems, violence is overt or hidden but ever present. Kandé is showing us that gestures carry undercurrents of meaning. Whether recalling a ceremony for the passing of loved ones or the remembrance Waof childhood, her poems call attention to body language and how we speak to one another without words even when all we have ‘left are crumbs/like the ones after a meal/you swipe away with a sponge’. . . . [Gestuary] breathes life into gestures overlooked by the unaffected and elevates them into the spiritual.”
* Washington UnbouISBN: 9781803096087
Dimensions: 235mm x 159mm x 10mm
Weight: 172g
112 pages