uHlanga is proud to announce the launch of the uHlanga New Poets series, a platform for the publication of debut collections from South Africa’s most promising young voices. Supported by a grant from the Arts & Culture Trust in association with Nedbank Arts Affinity, uHlanga New Poets will publish two debut collections in 2015: Matric Rage by Genna Gardini, and Failing Maths and My Other Crimes by Thabo Jijana.

uHlanga

uHlanga was founded in 2014 as an annual magazine of poetry from and about KwaZulu-Natal, but has since re-focused their attentions on helping launch the careers of young poets.

“Poetry magazines and anthologies are hugely important,” says uHlanga’s publisher Nick Mulgrew, who is also the associate editor of literary magazine Prufrock and Deputy Chair of Short Story Day Africa. “But a focused collection is the mark of a serious poet. There, however, aren’t enough opportunities for poets – young or more experienced – to take that step. So that’s where uHlanga comes in.”

“In Gardini and Jijana we have two of South Africa’s brightest young poets,” he adds. “I could scarcely think of two stronger books with which someone could launch a new poetry press, so I feel very fortunate indeed.”

Genna Gardini, based in Cape Town, is one of South Africa’s most decorated young poets and playwrights. She is the winner of the 2012 DALRO/New Coin Award, and a 2013 Mail & Guardian Young South African. Her two plays, WinterSweet (2012) and Scrape (2013), have both won Standard Bank Ovation Awards at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

Thabo Jijana, based in Port Elizabeth, is a rising star in South African literature. In 2011, he won the Anthony Sampson Foundation Award. In 2014, he won the Sol Plaatje/European Union Poetry Award. That same year, he also published his first book, the memoir Nobody’s Business.

The collections will be designed and published in print, and distributed throughout South Africa by Xavier Nagel Distribution. Copies will also be made available for sale on the uHlanga website. There are no plans for e-books, Mulgrew says, because “the returns on poetry e-books suck terribly”.

Outside, inside, Thabo Jijana

Here I am, on this frigid Saturday
in late 1998, kneading my eyes
and staring up a sloping Melindo
Street in Kamv’elihle. It’s past
cockcrow. And raining – a gentle
shower, like baking flour off
a sieve. I go from the sidewalk
to the front stoep, then I am
at the window inside, watching
the mamas of the kitchens (damp
dresses and OK shopping bags as
bonnets) scamper past. Any time
now, I know Mama’ll be walking
through the gate; she’ll have her
nurse’s cap. She’ll be tired. She’ll
be angry; there is nothing I can do.
So I make it to a bench near the
door to Madi’s bedroom, and sit
down. On the carpet, there’re the
blood drops – I’ll tell Mama it was
Madi who started it, that I didn’t
mean to. And then I’ll make a
stubborn face; Mama’ll shout that I
take off my pyjamas, find a washbowl
of water and pour Omo. And then –
then I’ll rinse my hands clean.

The Aquasize Instructor, Genna Gardini

She just doesn’t like the look of me,
I can tell,

with my face dripping from this cap, as if twisted from a tap
into a shallow pool of fat

that gathers twice at the chin.
It’s the gusset of ancient stockings you handmade.

I’m screwed out of my body, like a bulb.

On the first day, she berates me for not breathing properly –
says, “If you want to look like this, you must be healthy!” –

her body jerking in its costume, like biltong in a condom.

I duck down into the deep-end and, snorkeling, mouth:
“I’m not this moment. I’m its document. I’ll last longer!”

while old men thunder and tool towards me: sea bulls,
snapped back to movement by the water,

which does not hum and wait the way the world does,
inferring

and ushering you to death in a series of past bedrooms,
old lovers dropping from the windows like stompies.

Above, the instructor steams and strives. Furious
as a fish in a microwave, she tells the ladies “I’m 45!”

and waits for their reactions. They pause,

then titter. They are polite. Tonight, they’ll talk
to their husbands of her calves, risen and fingered

like rolls they wouldn’t buy at the Woolworths.

She catches me smirking and I want to say:
“See, I’m no longer cleft like a sum by this abacus of bone.

I’m inking time in metres! My brain sinks two! It clicks,
then switches.

Hungry as scissors for fingers!” But she looks away.

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