Century Worm

Century Worm confronts the impact of Western colonial policies and the sundering of nostalgia as the collection’s speaker recalls living amid ethnic and political violence in West Africa’s Ivory Coast. Drawing on human rights reports and personal experience, Century Worm wrestles with the ethical complexities of the lyric speaker at that threshold between witness and participation. Century Worm’s concern with the contours of belonging, with intimate relationship across distances, and with negotiating globalized subject positions align it with the work of Fady Joudah and Idra Novey. Its documentarian aspects find kinship in the recent poetry of Craig Santos Perez, Layli Long-Soldier, and Solmaz Sharif.