A Fire in the Hills

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X's life as credo.

About the Author :
Afaa Weaver's many poetry collections include The Plum Flower Trilogy and Spirit Boxing, and he is the author of many plays, including Berea. Weaver currently resides in Pleasant Valley, New York.

Review :

The splendid A Fire in the Hills holds lyrical inventories, telepathic persona poems, "southern chants for spells," "spinning top hairdos," and invented forms. Afaa Weaver can write any kind of poem you can imagine. He is our black nonconforming formalist breaking free of form to shape a spirit of witness. He is both our sage bear-poet of wisdom and our wily fox-poet of mischief. He's been writing long enough to resist all classifications except that of Master Poet.
--Terrance Hayes, winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Award for American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Afaa M. Weaver's A Fire in the Hills burns through violences internal and external--whether in Chicago, in schools, in public pools, by police against Black folks--while writing back to America. Weaver's poems-as-small-fires smolder with the beauty of lives ignored, demanding the reader be present while Weaver's voice speaks out from an activated palimpsest of histories. There is no looking away, these holy flames prophecy renewal. From the Black Lives Matter movement to surviving the threat of gun violence; poems to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Elizabeth Bishop, and TuPac Shakur; against landscapes of Chicago, the American South, AME Churches, and the New York City subway, each of these flames is elegy and ceremony: joy and darkness together woven into a whole as songs of mourning and songs of celebration.
--Rajiv Mohabir, author of Antiman