New Book Spotlight

Telepath

A mini-interview with Akua Lezli Hope

Tell us about your new book?

TELEPATH is a collection of about 52 poems engaged with, examining, reporting on and exploring telepathy as a state of knowing, doing. and being through an Afro-fantastic lens. The book explores communication beyond language—what is transmitted through intuition, emotion, memory, and resonance. TELEPATH shape shifts, occupying various poetic forms (including haibun, pantoum, triolet, villanelle, microacrostics concrete poetry, and a crown of sonnets) and personae, all possessing the unseen mindskill of hearing the unsaid, interrogating the realm of intention and patrolling possibilities of truth-rendering using the speculative to navigate unfolding realities and across time, from ancient past, to the Middle Passage, to modern America and imagined futures. There is a wry and wistful nostalgia; sharp poignant, recollections, and homages to a place time where bonds of friendship and family mediated the world’s assaults. TELEPATH has an ecosystem, a transmedia story world extending into sound with a play list, sculptures, visual art, artifacts, jewelry, wearable art, and a poetry phone line, so there are multimodal ways for folks to extend and explore the experience of the poems.

What aspect of the book was the most fun to write?

The most fun for me was the crown of sonnets: How This Is. I was trying to accomplish this feat of expression that involved a lot of interiority. The difficulty in its doing, the deep consideration of the story I wanted to relate of both suffering and suffused joy. As a child my favorite question was why.

You can know a why or maybe you know a that, but something essential still eludes and there is deeper why, I wanted each iteration to peel away, or build the onion. I felt its doing in my body mind. I recall thinking about discerning truth even as this multi-part poem is a made thing, its making portal building, spiral-spinning.

If there is one emotion or theme that you would hope that the reader connects with, what would that be?

I hope readers are stretched and awakened to the endless bills of goods we are sold:

that language is not the ultimate form of communication or understanding. Once we were interpenetrant, knowable, permeable in ways that did not undo us and in ways that we retain, even if only vestigially. This ability to know one another, to communicate, conspire and be in ways generally unrecognized, unacknowledged, denied and misunderstood. I hope folks see or find something familiar and awaken to their own inherent possibilities.