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“An exciting collection of new voices. I Zig and I Zag weaves together varying styles and stories – there is truly something for everyone here!”

Hanan Issa | National Poet of Wales

Masaka Madeda walks. That’s all. He walks, and he looks, and he listens, and after a hundred elegantly crafted pages you will realise Masaka has not missed a single thing.

Masaka’s epic title poem, I Zig and I Zag! is the reason our anthology exists. A pan-African flâneur moving through coastal Kenya with the unhurried attention of a man who understands that fishermen, crabs, grasshoppers, and lovers are all equally worth pausing for. Travelogue, diary, social observation, and spiritual reflection, sometimes together in the same breath. A masterpiece in form and meaning, and unlike anything else in British-published poetry.

Preceding Masaka’s epic, another nine poets who have also been paying attention:

Eric Ngalle Charles’ odes to loved ones no longer with us; reminders that ‘memories can be burdensome’. Rosamund McCullain combines myth, union, destruction and rebirth as acts of resistance against both social decline and otherness. A joint poem from Ciel Saludes and Mohammed Abdoel, steeped in generational and cultural reckoning. Luke A. Blaidd’s poem: a young man in a Corfu taverna, unable to tell his family who he is. Brân Denning’s disturbing confrontation with the maternal as an absent devouring need. Rakyah Assam’s memory, woven in postcolonial grief, creates a dense textural language steeped in chemical compounds and dislocation. Gareth Alun Roberts’ thematically interwoven triad, bound by a bardic register of love for land and language. G.I. James rejects the pressed bowling green. The Flaubert epigraph says it all: the meaning of life is to avoid boredom.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I Zig and I Zag is published with the financial support of the Books Council of Wales.