When the Wanderers Come Home - (African Poetry Book) by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona Eze as "one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century," Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction.

Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent struggling to recover.

When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman's story about being an exile, a survivor, and an outsider in her own country; it is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent, creating more wanderers and world citizens.

Review Quotes

"In Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's powerful When the Wanderers Come Home, the search for a place of arrival, self-recognition, and remembrance continues. . . . Despite the brokenness of what she describes, Wesley's poetic form is smooth and steady, the neat stanzas and non-rhyming couplets capably containing the most shocking revelations. . . . Wesley pays particular tribute to women's strength and resilience."--Bidisha, Poetry Review

"Wesley is a poet working to find language that can help show the fractures and fissures of a postwar nation and the personal realities of displacement and return. . . . [Wesley] uses the framing set by the generations before her to create poetry that not only speaks to her realities as a Liberian woman and survivor of the civil war but a poetry that implicates her own grief, allowing her a fully humanized space on par with the works of anglophone writers from all over the world. In this vein Wesley, representative of a kind of 'middle generation' between Aidoo and the emerging writers of today, helps break ground for a myriad of both content and style."--Matthew Shenoda, World Literature Today

About the Author

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University-Altoona. She has four other books of poetry, including Where the Road Turns and Becoming Ebony, part of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry.