About the Book

Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility.

Praise for Praise Song for My Children 

Winner of the  2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize 

Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love…
—Independent Book Review

These are affirming poems—songs, truly.
—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

Her poems urge me to know these histories, not just the fragments which may flicker among headlines, especially now, with so many of the African diaspora as our neighbors, fellow church goers and poets, who, as Wesley’s poems remind us, also bear the weight of unhealed racial wounds in the United States.
—Kathleen O’Toole, Presence 

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is unequivocal about the uses of poetry, of her poetry—she is determined to trade in truth, in the power of experience, in the beauty of language to alarm and delight and in the challenge she willingly bears to be an instrument of witness and articulation for her people—for Africa, for women, for the lovers of poetry. In Praise Song for My Children, we encounter a poet at the height of her skills and at the height of her clarity about the world and what things must be spoken into it. But we are blessed to be given an insight into how she arrives at this place of power—it is a remarkable selection of some of the most urgent poems to emerge out of the wars of Liberia. Here is work of incredible joy, deepest lamentation, and necessary hope. It is a sure testament.
—Kwame Dawes, author of City of Bones

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s poems resound as the seasoned voice of one of Africa’s most consequential poets, and an expert navigator of the Liberian diaspora’s sojourns in the United States. Praise Song for My Children displays her poetic poise in marshalling deep empathy, keen attention, and courage, unmasking the rawest losses of the war that tore her home asunder. These poems do not flinch at grief, mother-love, survivor’s anguish, and victory over the body’s betrayals. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s own children will recognize her influence on poets gleaning lessons from her craft as she invents new forms confidently adhering to contemporary conventions; marrying the meters of multiple languages; and revealing how to write one’s most intimate home, here Liberia, into the epicenter of what it means to be human. Sing her song, harmonizing the new and the known;read this book!
—Tsitsi Jaji, author of Beating the Graves

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River Is Rising, Becoming Ebony, and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa. Her new and selected collection, Praise Song for My Children, was released by Autumn House in March 2020. Her […]

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