2000 Blacks

2000 Blacks probes the complexity of economic and politically motivated migration from Africa, which has been referred to as "African Brain Drain." In the first sequence of poems, Ajibola Tolase explores Africa's history and encounters with the Western world, providing poetic insight into the economic instability precipitated by the transatlantic slave trade and exploitation of mineral resources. Moving inward, the second sequence plumbs the poet's complex relationship with his father, connecting his emotional and then physical absence with the consequences of community disintegration.

'Imagine / the land without the conflicts, ' writes Ajibola Tolase in his blazing debut, 2000 Blacks. From Nigeria to America, Tolase explores the surrealness that arises from living in repressive spaces. Yet despite the violence embedded in systems of power, 'the native word for burn is the same as dance.' This is a necessary poetry that leaves no quarter unsinged, a revelation in its willingness to dwell in the unimaginable.--Quan Barry, author of Auction, Yes, there is a villanelle and sonnets flanked by abcedarians, but it's the percussive vernacular that guides me through Ajibola Tolase's 2000 Blacks. It's the revelrous, 'If everyone celebrated / what didn't kill them, we can pretend / to be immortals' and the irreverent 'I would have hugged him / until he felt shame' that sings to me. Be it the tongue's many failings, absence, migration, Tolase has created a world I'll trumpet for years to come.--Clemonce Heard, author of Tragic City

Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. His writing has appeared in LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has received a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He is the 2023-2024 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University and graduated from the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.