I was commissioned by Contributing Culture Editor at New Frame News, Danielle Bowler, to review writer Maneo Mohale’s debut poetry collection, Everything is a Deathly Flower.

Published by uHlanga Press (who published Milk Fever), the collection is set in an almost mythical Johannesburg. An East Rand of sea dreams and floral nightmare. A rice-papered psalm for queer black femmes, this is a poetry collection that will stay with me - while it’s setting the world alight, obvs.

“Mohale grounds her origin story in the complex intersections of religion, queerness and African spirituality, and magically conjures a dream where societal structures no longer recreate ongoing situations whereby queer black femmes are continually violated. 

“Everything/ is different in the dream. In the dream, I am safe forever.”

With a strong command of place, Mohale’s poems expand our consciousnesses. The poet builds tangible worlds out of dreams; hers is an architecture of “lovers’ teeth” and “effervescent laughter”. Mohale employs metaphor as prophecy in her design of safe spaces – geographic and psychic – for marginalised people. 

“Every petal that fell/ from my mouth is a survivor””