Fenestration

Winner of The 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss Fenestration excavates public and private history. The poems here bristle with striking clarity and immediacy while compellingly confronting subjects such as the transatlantic slave trade, familial memory, HIV, environmental perils, and more. What happened inside those slave forts in Ghana, Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Africans were immured for weeks, sometimes months, before facing the horror of the Middle Passage? How does one carry the memory of his dead father? Fenestration, among other things, throbbing with an unflinching consciousness that splices history and memory, unfolds powerfully.