Femininity

In Tolu Agbelusi’s first poetry collection, Locating Strongwoman, there’s a poem titled “Museum of Women,” that acknowledges and celebrates the various ways women have affected the growth of the speaker and her ongoing construction of womanhood and selfhood. The poem uses the museum as an austere aide-mémoire of women’s lived experiences, the shifting between dispossession, […]

  The girl wearing a rose garland holding tulips between skinny fingers    goes to sleep on a cold con- crete slab in the city square. It’s night & here, we are calling on hope. But just what is hope when dawn breaks /& opens up her innocence to this sad world like the gutting […]