Hyper focus by Chris Bailey

Brief Summary How to Euthanize a Cactus' contains fifty five accessible poems from a respected Kenyan poet, poetry editor and judge. Approximately half of the poems are those that were written `raw' during Kenya's widely-publicized and sometimes misinterpreted Post-Election Violence (PEV) of early 2008, and which were circulated within Kenya, especially via a new group of young writers which formed at the time, `Concerned Kenyan Writers'. These include the popular `Praise Poem'. Kenya's PEV rocked a country that had previously been known (perhaps naively) as one of the most stable countries on the continent: possibly thousands were killed; hundreds of thousands were displaced, and often remain so. Occasionally journalistic, sometimes angry, sometimes hopeful, but always powerfully responsible, these PEV poems reflect an insider-outsider's experience of that time. These particular PEV poems are not quoted as part of this promotional blurb, at the writer's request. Many of the other poems are more personal, but never fully privatize in that manner which often separates much Western literature from that of the postcolonial world. These poems reflect a British immigrant's process of hybridizing into a new place, Kenya. They include the impressive `Continental Drift', which speaks from an out-of-body position about overlaps between cultures and the possibility of contented hybridity rather than that traditional `alienation' and `schizophrenia' which was expressed by earlier generations of immigrants and `colonial subjects' across the globe. Here is the first, UK-based verse paragraph of `Continental Drift', a multi-perspective poem that later screes effortlessly into East Africa: The sole of your boot grips a stone, and it begins: flakes of shale cascading over shale like swarms of graphite atoms gliding over graphite as an artist shades a mountain, dark Skiddaw, that has a figure (rapid scratching showing motion),slate-grey, almost imperceptible: but squint, you’ll see he's screening down the slope toward the lake. ISBN:9781907090165 Author:Stephen Derwent Partington