Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize 2017 Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018 Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Guardian & Daily Telegraph Urban & urbane it's a magnificent debut' Daily Telegraph A brilliant debut
- a tender nostalgic & at times darkly hilarious exploration of black boyhood masculinity & grief
- from one of my favourite writers'
- Warsan Shire Translating as initiation' kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man The poems of Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable debut explore this passage between two worlds ancestral & contemporary; between the living & the dead; between the gulf of who he is & how he is perceived Underpinned by a love of music language & literature here is a powerful exploration of race identity & masculinity celebrating what it means to be British & not British all at once