Lumens by Adebe DeRango-Adem

Both poetry collection and shadow-historiography, Lumens embarks on an Enlightenment quest in reverse. These poems question the violent racial metaphysics that enabled Europe’s rendering of Africa as ontological nothingness—in order to keep the fantasy of white supremacy alive. Echolocating voices buried and liminally illumined through time, Lumens reveals the colonial violence embedded in the quest “to know,” aided and abetted by the act of keeping Black and Indigenous futurities in the dark.

Inspired by writers like Claudia Rankine, Toni Morrison, and M. NourbeSe Philip who take risks with form, white space, and sound, Lumens is attuned to the musicality of language that lean into the polyphony of a multilingual and interracial upbringing. DeRango-Adem’s brilliant poetics patent a new claim to being as she dares to unknow the truths she was told: one outside discourses of captivity and liberation, inventing a mode of reasoning from the shadows.

Praise for Lumens

“The poems in Lumens perform a dialectical smoke show with ‘light’ and ‘dark’ as the gauzy antipodes of a floating Pan-Africanist dream world. Here are ambitious lyrics unafraid to buttonhole the metaphysical, the pataphysical and the existential all at once. With a little humour and a lot of panache, these poems exhort us to collectively celebrate our arrival as soul survivors. After reading Lumens I feel ‘ready to let the day carry me / in its mouth / by the teeth.'”—Shane Book, author of All Black Everything

“Lumens is a work of phantasmagoric power, a fugue equal parts daydark and nightlight composed by a poet daring ‘to step forward in [a] backwards country’ and unjust world, reader in tow, and face modernity’s uncomfortable truths head on.”—Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors

“From a soulful quietude pollinated by history to an illuminating science of the everyday, an ancient spirit moves through Lumens. Language springs up wild then tamed like a garden in full—and full spectrum—bloom, winding through the ages with wisdom and heart.”—Lillian Allen, Poet Laureate of Toronto