A Fire in the Hills

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