When the Fires Go Down by Lesego Rampolokeng

In When the Fires Go Down, Rampolokeng brings a gaze to body, history, language, and nation, moving with precision, urgency, and a musical intelligence. Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, this is a book of conjuring and confrontation: incantatory, improvisatory, and alive with ecstatic wordplay, where high theory and low vernacular collide, where freedom is sung and interrogated, where memory returns as rhythm, scar, and prophecy. Here, Rampolokeng writes from both sides of the tracks at once—A-side and B-side, inside and outside—holding us in that crux until the mirror cracks and history speaks back